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Comment by tialaramex

10 days ago

Notably all of these you mentioned aren't finished. C3 is 0.7, Jai is an "internal beta", Odin is working through a series of "dev" builds, Zig is 0.14, and Hare 0.24.2

This is maybe more striking when comparing against C which was already very old and battle tested in 1989 when it was standardized. If you pick any of these languages you're accepting an unknowable amount of churn. It better be worth it.

>This is maybe more striking when comparing against C which was already very old and battle tested in 1989 when it was standardized. If you pick any of these languages you're accepting an unknowable amount of churn.

C has plenty of issues too, even though it is very old, battle tested and standardized.

(How about all the UB in C, for example?)

That is why people are looking for C alternatives in the first place.

>It better be worth it.

It better be worth it for C too (and for C3; pun unintended but evaluated).

  • Sure, as someone who got paid to write C for many years I can't disagree it has issues - after all I no longer write C. I chose to write Rust instead.

    The notable commonality of these "C alternatives" is that they are still moving targets and yet that wasn't mentioned.

    • True, C3 at least is one breaking release per year and between those there are non-breaking additions.

      It's quite common for a project to pin to a stable version so this doesn't seem too unpredictable.