Talk on what a systems programming language needs to replace C

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Tuesday, 27 August 2019 at 08:06:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/26/2019 3:37 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
>> Given there is C and people feel it is time to move on to a 
>> better language,
>> and we have D, C++, Rust, and Go as the obvious candidates, 
>> there is a problem
>> none of these are actually candidates for the job of replacing 
>> C. Even Go,
>> which is supposed explicitly to be C for the 2010s.
>
> I've translated a lot of C code into betterC, and it isn't hard 
> and do not find myself missing anything about C in the process.

I think if we could make this process easy,maybe even automatic 
that would make it much easier to adopt D.

C2Rust was a DoD project that cost millions I think.  But maybe 
we could make it an SAoC project next year.  We could use their 
CBOR dump of the C AST or DMC.

But is it unfair to say D is missing an AST that's pleasant to 
work with?

I'm not sure whether it would be better to construct a parse tree 
or AST for this purpose but eg with DPP my personal sense is it 
would be useful to have a way to generate D code at a more 
abstract level than strings.

Anyway if you could translate C to D it surely wouldn't hurt.