Comment by vlovich123
6 hours ago
Those don’t really support C in any real stretch, talking about general experience with microcontrollers and closed vendor toolchains; it’s a frozen dialect of C from decades ago which isn’t what people think of when they say C (usually people mean at least the 26 year old C99 standard but these often at best support C89 or even come with their own limitations)
It’s still C though, and rust is not an option. What else would you call it? Lots of c libraries for embedded target C89 syntax for exactly these reasons. Also for what it’s worth, SDCC seems to support very modern versions of C (up to C23), so I also don’t think that critique is very valid for the 8051 or stm8. I would argue that c was built with targets like this in mind and it is where many of its quirks that seem so anachronistic today come from (for example int being different sizes on different targets)