Comment by dboon

I am making Cargo for C. I have 3/4 of a working demo; the tool can build itself, including some non-trivial dependencies which I've ported to build natively with the tool (instead of wrapping their Make or CMake or whatever).

The pitch: It's insane that we have to pull in Python or Lua to build C code. CMake is an abomination against god that has become usable in spite of itself. Zig cc is proof that this entire ecosystem is an embarrassment. My tool gives C projects a TOML manifest, and builds scripts written in C and JIT compiled by the tool. Now, you can write build scripts in the language itself, pull in dependencies you wanted to use anyway.

It also provides a stable ABI. There's an HTTP-backed index and a Git-backed index. And it generally does the same thing for C that, say, Bun did for JS/TS. You'll be able to run C files from source and have the entire ecosystem available. You'll be able to trivially generate single file static binaries, or dynamically link to an older glibc without arcane tricks. It will fix C.

I'm also still working on my "what if we wrote a real standard library for C"; I added some feedback I got from the release.

https://github.com/tspader/sp