BUbuserror·May 30, 2018
I also think that the committee is out of touch. C99 was an awesome improvement on the language, and since then, it went downhill.
We don't need the extra weird C11 syntax things, duplicating of existing libraries; we want tools that scope C better, or extensions that have been proven helpful and stable (one such example is the switch(x) { case A...B: } from gcc!).
I want strict boundary checking, I want an array base type that can't be cast as a pointer. I want some sort of scoping mechanism (ie, blocks), I want a bit of standardisation of memory barrier and such. I want #pragma once FFS -- it was proven a good idea for 25 years.
Basically there's tons of stuff that could help make the language better -- C99 did that; C99 is a masterpiece for example on how you can statically initialise extremely complex data into a single block, without
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having to use code. It's used all over the Linux kernel (amongst other thing; for example my own simavr is heavily based on that feature [0]).
* Standardise the stupid bit order in bitfield declaration FFS. I've been wanting to use that feature for 30 years and I can't because they 'forgot' to make up their mind!
* Coroutine standardisation would be awesome (stack swap primitives, with boundary checks etc)....
* gcc 'sub functions' (or a derivative) would be awesome if improved to make them safe.
* Reference counted allocator (basically, get libtalloc and roll it in [1])
There are so many things that could be improved, without diverging into weird stuff nobody needs (complex math anyone??!?!).
* In fact I want SIMD. I don't need these complex types.
[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/simavr/cores/...
[1]: https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/index.html