> This might be a dumb question, but using this + clang bounds-safety, whats the difference between this and something like Zig or Odin.

I really need to learn more about Zig, but from what I know, there are still worlds of possibilities that a modern, well-designed language offers over something like lib0xc. Zig's ability to evaluate any expression at compile-time is one such example.

But generally, lib0xc gives you bounds-safety everywhere it can. Languages like Zig and Rust give you type-safety to their own degrees, which I think is a superset.

> What do you think C would need in order to reach the user experience of those languages?

Not really having direct user experience, it's hard for me to say. But if I what I can give you is a list of features that would make large parts of lib0xc irrelevant:

1. Protocols/traits

2. Allocating from a caller's stack frame (think, returning the result of `alloca` to the caller)

3. printf format specifiers for stdint.h types and for octet strings

4. Ability to express function parameter lists as structures

5. New sprintf family that returns a value which is always less than or equal to the size passed (no negative values)

Basically, I think that the C standard should be working aggressively to cut down on the use cases for heap allocation and `void *`. And I think that the bounds safety annotations should become first-class language features.

Because it is C not Zig/Odin. The mental/ecosystem cost to use a new language is way way under-estimated in most cases.

This is a misrepresentation based on a misunderstanding on how standardization works. The C standard committee has long recognized the need for better safety and carefully made it possible so that C could be implemented safely. But the process is that vendors implement something and then come together during standardization so that it is compatible, not that the standardization is the government that prescribes top-down what everybody has to do. Vendors did not bother to provide safer C implementations and safety features (such as bounds checking) did not get much attention from users in the past. So I am happy to see that there is now more interest in safety, because as soon as there solutions we can start putting them into the standard.

(We can do some stuff before this, but this is always a bit of a fight with the vendors, because they do not like it at all if we tell them what to do, especially clang folks)

Immediately what I thought of when I saw /microsoft.

Not all of the APIs were brain-dead. They just ignored all previous developments and in the proposal they didn't even remove the C++-related language.

That produces a bit of a chicken and egg probablem for a stdlib overhaul. Compilers and libc implementations don't have a strong reason to implement safer APIs, because if it is non-standard then projects that want to be portable won't use it , but it won't get standardized unless they do add safer APIs.

So the best hope is probably for a third party library that has safet APIs to get popular enough that it becomes a de facto standard.

I mostly just install a -dev package on Linux and I am done.

Thanks for the reply. Noted :)

If someone needs more than C provides, why on earth would they choose C++?

No rational person is going to want to have to deal with 10x the number of foot guns.

Literally anything when moving from C is better than C++.

People say that kind of thing on HN every now and then. I have no idea why this idea is around, it's a complete fantasy in my opinion. I say this as someone who mostly uses Linux.