It works. You have hammers and nails. Then, someday, a dude come with the new Hammer23, with better ergonomical grip, colored high density 3 sided head, and so on. Yeah, cool, but I still have the same nails to nail, and my current hammer do the job perfectly. And I drilled a hole in my workbench ten year ago that have the perfect size for my current hammer.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
21 points (100.0% liked)
C Programming Language
1323 readers
29 users here now
Welcome to the C community!
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
... When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
... The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
- irc: #c
๐ https://en.cppreference.com/w/c
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Later versions than C99 have no real added value proposition for the real use-cases where C is actually desired as an implementation language.
Later versions than C99 continue to introduce C++isms among other shit, from committee members some of whom probably never coded anything serious in C. This actually sometimes trickles down to compiler implementations even when you're sticking with an older version. So they manage to anger you even when you're keeping a distance.
Despite street myths and stereotypes, most people who choose C for some projects are not grey-hairs stuck in the past and incapable of learning new tools. Many of them in fact do use newer languages like Rust where they see fit. So there is no pressure to pick the one or two features from newer C versions that are maybe possibly can be useful.
Still, for some big projects that are kind of half-stuck with millions of lines of C, while at the same time having immense pressure to deliver maximum reliability AND security, these newer versions could proof useful at times. But the only project that comes to mind that fits this mold is the Linux kernel really. And there, non-standard language extensions are getting used anyway, so it's kind of an exceptional situation, that is also not very portable, but that's not a concern by the very nature of where a kernel sets in the stack.
That's very fair for the linux kernel, I'm aware that they use more modern features of C, though i have no idea to what extent.
It was part of the inspiration for asking this question to begin with.
The main reason I stick to it is that I target platforms that normally don't have anything else. Also the rules are easier to understand.
If you're willing to share, are you talking about embedded?
They haven't bothered to update their knowledge about it. And why should they? They got gud with C89 and can write software that works with it. So since they don't know how to, when they use the modern stuff they break things; they haven't learnt the footguns yet. The same way a n00b would write broken software with any version of C. That feels bad so they reject it. It's like how everyone thinks the music from when they were a teenager is the best music. Starting learning from nothing it's probably better to learn the new stuff too, but if you're maintaining software written with one version it's probably not worth updating it and so you'll need to just work with what there is.
Although if you really need generics and other more advanced language features and you're starting a new project from scratch it might be better to go with something like rust at this point.
I don't know if I'd assume the same about them, as the way the argument was worded made it seem the new features aren't a positive, or are broken in some way, or at least gave the appearance of the actual reason being technical and not skill.
I was originally thinking of the use case for C is when you need to have something in a closed ecosystem, as in no dependencies, so generics made sense as an example, and while I'm aware one can use rust, it usually enables (and in a sense encourages) pulling in many dependencies, which is not always desirable.