Comment by mjg59
6 hours ago
Ok you're still missing the point. This isn't about C being good or bad or suitable or unsuitable. It's about whether it's good that C has, through no deliberate set of choices, ended up embodying the interface that lets us build rust that can be called by go.
Yes, because C is, by virtue of its history and central role in the development of all mainstream operating systems, the lowest common denominator.
Also, if I remember correctly, the first Rust and Go compilers were written in C.
Yes! It's easy to see why we got here, but that doesn't mean it's the optimal outcome!
OCaml was used for rust.
> Yes, because C is, by virtue of its history
Sure history is great and all, but in C it's hard to say reliably define this int is 64-bit wide, because of the wobbly type system. Plus, the whole historical baggage of not having 128-bit wide ints. Or sane strings (not null terminated).
> in C it's hard to say reliably define this int is 64-bit wide
That isn't really a problem any more (since c99). You can define it as uint64_t.
But we have a ton of existing APIs that are defined using the wobbly types, so we're kind of stuck with it. And even new APIs use the wobbly types because the author didn't use that for whatever reason.
But that is far from the only issue.
128 bit ints is definitely a problem though, you don't even get agreement between different compilers on the same os on the same hardware.