1. A lot of people use the old C standards.
2. Not a lot of people use the new ones.
3. A lot of useful software is written in C.
4. Not a lot of useful software is written in any of the other languages you've listed in this conversation, despite the fact that you can hardly call them "new" at this point.
I'm done with you, I'll leave you to puzzle out the obvious conclusion of these 4 points.
You write software your way, I'll write it mine, and in 10 years we can check our homework. The first 10 years of Rust haven't really given us any results software-wise, but I'm sure with language design powerhouses such as yourself on the case, and just a few more pieces of syntax sugar, you can turn it around.
> there might be some dependence on what you mean by "useful".
I should've been clearer about that, but what I mean by that is pretty much what a normal non-technical person would consider an useful piece of software - Photoshop, Figma, Excel, Chrome, Windows, Android, Blender, AutoCAD, Unreal Engine, any Office Suite...
Since this is a technical forum I think we'd both easily agree on a bunch of very technically impressive software that the average person hasn't heard of - ffmpeg, qemu, LLVM, Linux, Postgres, V8, etc.
It would be a stretch to put any of the tool on either of those lists. Given the popularity of Rust, and that it's now over 10 years old, I'd expect at least one major program that can serve as an example of "here's this very useful, complex software package, as proof that our methodology works and you can do cool things this way."
> So to claim that the C programmers do not want change, first you need to ignore the vast majority that do want but already dropped C...
Good, we can ignore them. It's not a language for everybody, and if you're happily using C++, or Zig, or Nim, keep doing that.
Developer experience is a weigted sum of many variables. For you cool syntax features may play a huge role of that, for most C programmers a simple language with clear and understandable semantics is much more important.
There are many languages with cool syntax and shiny features, and very few of the latter kind. C belongs to the latter, and it also happens to be running a vast majority of the world's most important software.
You keep bringing up Rust as an example. It's probably the most famous of the new-age systems languages. If it's such a great language, when will we see a useful program written in it?
To the brain of a compiler writer UB means "the standard doesn't specify what should happen, therefore I can optimize with the assumption UB never happen." I disagree that this is how UB should be interpreted, but this fight is long lost.
With that interpretation of UB, all `unreachable()` means is that the compiler is allowed to optimize as if this point in the code will never be reached. The unreachable macro is standard in C23 but all major compilers provide a way to do it, for all versions of the language.
So if you have a statement like `if (x > 3) unreachable()` that serves as both documentation of the accepted values, as a constraint that the optimizer can understand - if x is an unsigned int, it will optimize with the assumption that the only possible values are 0,1,2.
Of course in a debug build a sane compiler would have `unreachable()` trigger an assert fail, but they're not required to, and in release they most definitely won't do so, so you can't rely on it as a runtime check.
The vast majority of C programmers will agree that they don't care for any of the new features, as is clearly evident by the fact that almost nobody elects to use the latest standards.
The "most popular programming languages" are irrelevant here.
C and C++ are standardized languages, and also the tools we use for code that actually matters. A standard that can't be implemented is worthless, and even the "3 high quality" implementations of C/C++ haven't fully implemented the latest 2 editions of either language.
There's a lot more riding on these two languages than you give credit for, and they should be held to a higher standard. C is not the language to experiment with shiny new features, it's the language that works.
> I can tel you that as a matter of fact a key reason why the likes of Rust took off
So what's the problem? If Rust is gaining traction on C/C++,
and people are excited about what it brings to the table, use it. We'll both do our thing, let it play out - we'll see which approach yields better software in 10 years.
I'm done with you, I'll leave you to puzzle out the obvious conclusion of these 4 points.
You write software your way, I'll write it mine, and in 10 years we can check our homework. The first 10 years of Rust haven't really given us any results software-wise, but I'm sure with language design powerhouses such as yourself on the case, and just a few more pieces of syntax sugar, you can turn it around.