On Tuesday, 16 November 2021 at 21:00:48 UTC, Robert Schadek wrote:

I really want to reply to this in detail but as it turns out my DConf talk does a lot of that already. Which is weird for something I wrote and recorded last week :P

I obviously love the compiler daemon idea, but I don't know how that's practically feasible given the codebase we have right now.

On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 20:36:10 UTC, JN wrote:

Zig is targeting former Objective-C developers with @ everywhere, has module system based on JavaScript AMD model with its @import, and doesn't fix use-after-free.

C folks like to manage their own memory and they get it wrong most of the time.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212869

On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 21:58:17 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:

I do not think I said anything new.
I believe I have been saying the same things as long as I have been part of the quarterly industry meetings.

The dmd codebase will have to compile the new codebase, and serve as a reference for the language.
Nothing more. This is a rewrite!

On Thursday, 18 November 2021 at 07:50:44 UTC, Robert Schadek wrote:

Yep. I'd keep the DMD parser. (Just because I think writing parsers is a pain in the butt.)
But the rest is going to be an informed rewrite to avoid mistakes of the past.
(Which are reasonable since we didn't know what D would become back then.)

As I said previously I am already working on a prototype.
I am going to announce it as soon as it can compile more than a simple test.

On Thursday, 18 November 2021 at 06:54:33 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

god help us all, if that assertion is true. (which of course, it's not).

'some of the time', sure, even the best, but 'most of the time'.. that is hyperbole - except perhaps, in the case of novices.

The tools we have available these days, to assist C programmers, is something to factored in when speaking about the C language.

btw. C powers the world.

https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming

On Thursday, 18 November 2021 at 09:08:43 UTC, Stefan Koch wrote:

Very excited to see that prototype :D

Just curious, how do you find the time for this? You're working on newCTFE, core.reflect/codegen, a JIT, taskifying dmd and this was there as well? What's your secret to this ultra productive programming output?

On Thursday, 18 November 2021 at 09:28:08 UTC, forkit wrote:

It is. It always has been, and decades and many tools later, it still is. This isn't a matter of opinion, it's provable fact.

Huge if true.

All of the time, if one only counts projects of a certain size and up. Of course it's trivial to get it right in a 50 line program.

Is Walter a novice? Am I? Is Andrei? Is <insert name here>...?

I have no idea how or why this myth of the "sufficiently competent C programmer" persists. They don't exist.

I've used them.

So does burning coal, but I wouldn't recommend that either.

On Thursday, 18 November 2021 at 09:28:08 UTC, forkit wrote:

Unfortunely,

"~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues"

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/16/a-proactive-approach-to-more-secure-code/

"As part of our continuous commitment to improve the security of the Android ecosystem, we are partnering with Arm to design the memory tagging extension (MTE). Memory safety bugs, common in C and C++, remain one of the largest vulnerabilities in the Android platform and although there have been previous hardening efforts, memory safety bugs comprised more than half of the high priority security bugs in Android 9."

https://security.googleblog.com/2019/08/adopting-arm-memory-tagging-extension.html

C only powers the world, because lawsuits due to security exploits still aren't a common practice in software like in other industries, where liability is legally enforced.

The day this changes, C won't power anything for much longer.