Comment by ErikCorry
3 years ago
Perhaps Carbon is the first in a series of new low level languages that free us from the impossible tensions of C/C++ having to be all things to all (low level) programmers.
I would love a new language for implementing high level languages. I've worked on several of these projects and we use mostly unstandardized dialects of C++ and it's really not fit for purpose.
While at it, I should mention Zig.
Does zig have as a selling point that it has _more_ UB than C?
AFAICT, Zig is halfway step between C and C++ for desktop and mobile developers.
I'm thrilled that the folks steering C are keeping the needs of embedded developers at the forefront.
> AFAICT, Zig is halfway step between C and C++ for desktop and mobile developers.
What does this even mean? Zig very much has embedded use as a target as well, with freestanding use being a first-class citizen. The majority of the standard library works without an OS (and if you wish, you can provide your own OS-like interfaces quite easily, and use the OS-dependent parts in a freestanding environment). I've written a UEFI bootloader in Zig, and right now I'm using it on an RP2040 as well, cross compiling from an M1 Mac without the need to install any additional cross compilers.
I'd argue that it might be even better for embedded than C/C++ eventually, as unlike them, allocation is even more tightly controlled, with a convention that only functions (or datastructures) that take an allocator as an argument will allocate memory on the heap. Future versions may even restrict recursion in certain contexts to guarantee max stack depths.
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