Ask HN: What would you tweak in C to make it a nicer language?

adamnemecek | karma 57571 | avg karma 6.54 · 2014-08-29 04:44:30+00:00

Probably a legit macro system.

andrewchambers | karma 2271 | avg karma 2.28 · 2014-08-29 04:47:52+00:00

Any ideas on how it should look? Perhaps there are good examples in non lisp languages which have good systems, though i haven't tried them to know which is good.

adamnemecek | karma 57571 | avg karma 6.54 · 2014-08-29 04:49:01+00:00

I don't have much experience with it but Rust's seems to be pretty good.

J_Darnley | karma 338 | avg karma 0.38 · 2014-08-30 15:46:32+00:00

My personal suggestion would be to borrow the nasm/yasm pre-processor. x264 has certainly used it to great effect.

mc_hammer | karma 40 | avg karma 0.13 · 2014-08-29 05:08:31+00:00

i would make it coffeescript like syntax and add in underscorejs functionality -_-

sunny1304 | karma 1 | avg karma 0.06 · 2014-08-29 05:26:02+00:00

I want generic programming like Rust.

angersock | karma 15241 | avg karma 2.36 · 2014-08-29 05:40:36+00:00

Some handy little things:

1. Standard library support for safe arithmetic (easily capturing overflows, underflows, and so forth).

2. Standard library support for threading and synchronization primitives.

3. Mandated tail-call optimization through pragmas or perhaps just requiring it in the spec.

4. Create explicit and differentiated arithmetic and logical shift left and shift right.

5. Add a standard way of specifying arbitrarily-sized integers (with optimization for the common word sizes).

6. Add destructuring operations.

7. Add anonymous unions.

8. Add switching on strings in switch statements.

9. Add proper UTF8 support.

10. Add a slab allocator to the standard library.

11. Add regexes to the standard library (possible as a language feature).

~

Several of these (7, for example) are being addressed in C11 (if that ever comes out).

reply

andrewchambers | karma 2271 | avg karma 2.28 · 2014-08-29 06:36:44+00:00

These are all great.

sharth | karma 245 | avg karma 1.87 · 2014-09-02 12:57:29+00:00

I'm confused by "if that ever comes out". C11 was released 3 years ago.

MalcolmDiggs | karma 728 | avg karma 1.07 · 2014-08-29 05:56:25+00:00

Most of my pain-points with C were solved with syntactic-sugar libraries like Cello (http://libcello.org/).

J_Darnley | karma 338 | avg karma 0.38 · 2014-08-29 15:53:43+00:00

Make everyone use C99 standard integers for various data types so that people can stop trying to "detect" what type to use in a horrible autotools script.

darsenault | karma 8 | avg karma 4.0 · 2014-09-02 18:49:54

What are some other libraries, like libCello, that help with c in syntactic-sugary ways?