Comment by uecker
1 day ago
I do not see any serious contender to C. And considering that most people developing alternative languages that aim to replace C do not seem to have a good understanding what makes a good system programming language, I also do not see this changing soon. Tooling for memory safety will improve and I expect we will also have something complete in ISO C at some point. But already today, one does not have to write modern C as your parents did, e.g. there is no need to do unsafe pointer arithmetic and many other unsafe features can simply be avoided. Signed integer overflow can be checked at run-time. Only temporal memory safety is missing a good solution that ensures safety, but I do not find this is to be a major problem in my projects (with some discipline about pointer ownership)
Isn't C++ already a serious contender to C? It clearly has not replaced C everywhere, but it's taken over much of C's market. And if C++ could do it, I don't see why another language couldn't do the same (that's not to say that the next language to do that already exists today).
One thing that's important to notice, I think, is that low-level languages' combined market share has fallen sharply since the 1970s, and it doesn't seem that the trend is about to sharply reverse direction. To me that suggests that if a low-level language wants to be more popular than C++, it should focus on low-level programming and shouldn't try to also be a good applications programming language (as C++ has tried to do that, but the overall market share of C and C++ is lower now than it was in, say, 1990), but I could be wrong about that.
I guess this depends on what you consider a contender. Certainly C++ has taken market share from C and Rust will do to. But I do not think these languages are able to replace C.