this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Programming
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Yea, mb, on reread yea.
But still, nothing new should be written in it and everything old should be rewritten or deprecated over time. Entrenched and around, yes, useful....no
There's very little benefit to starting something new in C and a whole lot of downsides. At least FORTRAN and COBOL have niche use cases. C doesn't really have a good niche case that something else newer and more secure can't fill AFAIK
The problem is switching for enterprises because of how much momentum there is. Especially in embedded.
I worked on a 30 year old C code base that’s still being developed now for future products. Some components are literally 20+ years old mostly untouched. Sure they could switch to Rust or something but they’re fucked since nearly none of the staff have relevant experience in anything but the in house C build system and changing over multiple thousands of C files to another language will literally take years even if you got people trained up.
Plus, in embedded pretty much no big HW supplier provides BSPs or drivers in anything but C. If NXP etc. aren’t giving you anything but C, management doesn’t want to start combining languages.
I advocated for Rust when we started a ground-up new project, but got shot down every which way. Only those younger than like 35 were into the idea. Old managers are scared of anything new and their whole life has been C. I don’t know how you convince those kinds of people and maybe we’ll get some movement in another 10 years but enterprises are a slow cautious mess.