Comment by pjmlp
15 hours ago
The C standard committee even refused Dennis Ritchie proposal for fat pointers.
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/varar...
Meanwhile after UNIX was done at AT&T, the C language authors hardly cared for the C standard committee in regards to the C compiler supported features used in Plan 9 and Inferno, being only "mostly" compatible, followed up having a authoring role in Alef, Limbo and Go.
> The language accepted by the compilers is the core ANSI C language with some modest extensions, a greatly simplified preprocessor, a smaller library that includes system calls and related facilities, and a completely different structure for include files.
https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/comp
I doubt most C advocates ever reflect on this.
> Meanwhile after UNIX was done at AT&T, the C language authors hardly cared for the C standard committee in regards to the C compiler supported features used in Plan 9 and Inferno, being only "mostly" compatible, followed up having a authoring role in Alef, Limbo and Go.
> I doubt most C advocates ever reflect on this.
What would be the conclusion of this reflection? Assuming you have reflected on this, what was your conclusion?
That the language authors concluded C was done, there was no point collaborating with WG14, and there were better tools to do their operating systems research on.
> there were better tools to do their operating systems research on.
I think that's the key, Ritchie, Thompson, Pike were interested in OS research while people that love C today just want a simple and powerful language with manual memory management. It is not the first time in history when the creation has a separate life from the creator's wishes.