[thasso]

You can do lot's of the same things in C too, as the author mentions, without too much pain. See for example [1] and [2] on arena allocators (which can be used exactly as the temporary allocator mentioned in the post) and on accepting that the C standard library is fundamentally broken.

From what I can tell, the only significant difference between C and Odin mentioned in the post is that Odin zero-initializes everything whereas C doesn't. This is a fundamental limitation of C but you can alleviate the pain a bit by writing better primitives for yourself. I.e., you write your own allocators and other fundamental APIs and make them zero-initialize everything.

So one of the big issues with C is really just that the standard library is terrible (or, rather, terribly dated) and that there is no drop-in replacement (like in Odin or Rust where the standard library seems well-designed). I think if someone came along and wrote a new C library that incorporates these design trends for low-level languages, a lot of people would be pretty happy.

[1]: https://www.rfleury.com/p/untangling-lifetimes-the-arena-all...

[2]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/10/08/

[gingerBill]

The author literally says that they used to do that in C. And I've done a lot of those things in C too, it just doesn't mean that C has good defaults nor good ergonomics for many of the tasks other languages have be designed to be good with.

[9dev]

I am not a C programmer, but I have been wondering this for a long time: People have been complaining about the standard library for literal decades now. Seemingly, most people/companies write their own abstractions on top of it to ease the pain and limit exposure to the horrors lurking below.

Why has nobody come along and created an alternative standard library yet? I know this would break lots of things, but it’s not like you couldn’t transition a big ecosystem over a few decades. In the same time, entire new languages have appeared, so why is it that the C world seems to stay in a world of pain willingly?

Again, mind you, I’m watching from the outside, really just curious.

[uecker]

I would not agree that the ergonomics are so much better in Odin that switching to another language is worth giving up the advantages of a much larger ecosystem. For a hobby project this may not matter at all, of course.

[arp242]

> I think if someone came along and wrote a new C library that incorporates these design trends for low-level languages, a lot of people would be pretty happy.

I suppose glib comes the closest to this? At least the closest that actually sees fairly common usage.

I never used it myself though, as most of my C has been fairly small programs and I never wanted to bother people with the extra dependency.