Comment by pjmlp
3 months ago
Because C++ was "TypeScript for C", plenty of room to improvement that WG 14 refuses to act on for the last 50 years.
Yes, most language features past the C89 subset are not supported, besides the C standard library, because C++ has much better alternatives, like why _Generic when templates are a much saner approach, than type dispatching with the pre-processor.
However that is besides the point, 99% of C89 code minus a few differences, is valid C++ code, and if the situation so requires, C++ code can be exactly the same way.
And lets not forget most FOSS projects have never moved beyond C89/C99 anyway, so stuff like _Generic is of relative importance.
C, unlike C++, does not really force new versions onto you, even if dependencies begin using them. That said, Linux switched to C11. Newer versions of C will gradually be adopted, despite the incompatibilities this causes for C++.
As for WG 14, they incorporated numerous C++isms into C. While you claim that they did not go far enough, I am sure you will find many who would say that they went too far.
I very much doubt it, when someone decides to make full of use of recent ISO C on a C library header file.
I claim they aren't focused on what matters, we don't need C++isms into C, we already have C++, and C should have been done as language back in C89.
Anyone that wanted more has always been able to use C++ instead, or Objective-C on Apple/NeXT land.
What we need is for WG14 to finally take security regarding strings, arrays seriouslys, not yet another reboot of functions using (ptr, length) pairs.
> I very much doubt it, when someone decides to make full of use of recent ISO C on a C library header file.
I have tested this WRT _Generic as it was a concern. It turns out that GCC will accept it on older versions, which permits compatibility. You might feel that this is wrong, but that is how things are right now.