There has been languages such as D, but it has C level complexity which is probably not appealing to C developers. It

No Garbage collection / manual memory management. C dominates in areas where you need tight control over memory usage. In this space garbage collection is not going to cut it. That is what has prevented Go from fully replacing C.

Likewise a lot of well tested C code will not get rewritten. It will simply linger. But we may in the future reach a point where other languages are simply picked over C for the areas C has traditionally dominated.

Do I personally think C will be replaced? I am not holding my breath. This is a long process, and we don’t have any clear winners yet. Large organizations are not going to jump onto Zig, Odin, V or whatever else comes along until a clear alternative has crystalized.

There are many reasons why we should replace C, and the primary reason it has not been done before is that the focus has been elsewhere and the tools have been lacking. This is not the kind of thing one large organization necessarily decides to do. You need it to be easy for a little cottage industry of individuals to try there hand at it. With LLVM as a tool and Go as inspiration that is fully possible today.

Systems level friendly. You need to be able to manipulate bits and bytes. You need good binary operators and pointers. Lots of languages over the last decades don’t have proper pointers. Java made pointers a swear word, but Go partially brought them back.

I think one of the first real signs that there is an appetite for a modern incarnation of C and C is the rising popularity of Go and Rust. We see a lot of typical tools that was commonly written in C or C in the past now being written in Go or Rust. A plethora of command line tools e.g. are popping up, which have been written in either of these langauges. I cover some of these tools here. You see people attempt to write game engines in Rust.

Let us expand on the last point. Nobody is even going to bother starting to replace the existing C infrastructure if it means you need to rewrite the whole program from scratch in one go. One thing that in my experience made it easy to transition from Objective-C to Swift was that I could in fact rewrite one single method at a time, recompile and test the program.

Build on established knowledge and conventions. Go was really quick to pick up because despite some syntax changes, the APIs and ways of coding was very similar to a C programmer.

Likewise a lot of well tested C code will not get rewritten. It will simply linger. But we may in the future reach a point where other languages are simply picked over C for the areas C has traditionally dominated.

Both Go and Rust gave some inspiration to how C/C could be rethought and armed with this inspiration and LLVM, a little cottage industry of possible C replacements are popping up:

A big part of the possibilities of providing an alternative to C I believe exists today due to the maturity of LLVM. LLVM means a of the really complicated stuff of generating high performance code and targeting many platforms is solved. It makes language development accessible to a lot more people.

Small binaries. Like C, Zig e.g. allows you to make really small binaries. If you want another language in the embedded space you cannot use a language such as Go which produce large binaries.

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ise financial support for several charitable initiatives through his interest in music, participating in Theo Epstein’s “Hot Stove Cool Music” events to benefit The Foundation To Be Named Later as well as supporting Chicago Cubs Charities through events at the House of Blues in Chicago.

And what does replace even mean? Cobol is still running a lot of our financial transactions. Yet I think we can say that Cobol has been replaced in the sense that nobody today will deliberately choose Cobol for any new project. And wherever possible people will attempt to migrate away from it.

To replace C, a language will typically need to be suitable for the niches that C still dominate. Not all types of languages are suited for this. So the languages I have listed have a number of features in common which make the suitable to replace C: