Talk on what a systems programming language needs to replace C

[Dibyendu Majumdar]

On Monday, 26 August 2019 at 10:44:59 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:

> But why is the purpose to make Rust a superset of C. Why can't 
> we challenge that C is the ideal language for "systems 
> programming" except that it has problems such as buffer 
> overflow. OK so C is a portable assembly language focussed on 
> PDP-8 and PDP-11 hacked to work on VAX-11, but why can't we 
> start afresh?

Personally I think neither Rust nor D can replace C.
C is a high level assembler. A replacement needs to be a better 
high level assembler rather than a language that has many 
abstractions.
The particular quality of C is that you can mentally see how your 
code translates to machine code. Languages with lot of 
scaffolding destroy this property.