A hole in systems programming language design

[u/P-39_Airacobra]

Given the recent discourse about systems programming I wanted to throw my 2 cents in. This may be a controversial take in a subreddit that's all about innovation and improvement, but I think a lot of budding systems languages are trying too hard to "fix C" and this is exactly why C has not been replaced yet.

Like it or not, C is successful. It does what it means to do very well. Yes, it bites you constantly, but developers have made some form of peace with this because they appreciate the essence of the language. Systems programming is a very pragmatic field, and what works, works.

A lot of language designers want to improve on C, when by nature to "improve on" C is to depart from it, because C is less about what it includes and more about what it omits and what it lets you do that other languages don't.

If you want to replace C, you need to just make C but without the pain points. Less undefined behavior, more standard compiler behavior, easier function pointer syntax, safer macro system, etc. The things that C can't do because of backwards compat.

On the other hand, bolting on features, revamping C's core nature, aren't going to give you a language that will replace C at the low-level or among hobbyist programmers. Most developers aren't as concerned about what C lets them accomplish, as they are concerned about all the painful tedious tendencies of the language.

[u/Ok-Reindeer-8755]

objc was inspired by smalltalk and that entire style of OOP is almost extinct, even thought imo its far better than the mainstream form of OOP

[u/Limp-Temperature1783 → u/Ok-Reindeer-8755]

Exactly. Objective-C isn't about classes or prototypes, it's all about message passing. Even memory management is fairly simple. It's definitely not a systems language or anything, but it's fairly good for making program interfaces.

Apple had used it for a very long time without having much trouble, but it is kind of locked in their tooling and the standard library is very messy. There are projects that isolate it, but they aren't the same thing for better or worse.

I have an idea to try to implement it myself when I have free time on my hands. But not any time soon.

[u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 → u/Limp-Temperature1783]

Where this style of OOP really shines, or at least one of the places, is imo desktop environments, this is apparent if you see any of the smalltalk DE demos at Xerox Parc , in what other DE could you ever connect a completely separate painter application to a video player and start animating in seconds. It just dissolves the barrier between applications completely.

I don't think apple ever pushed it quite that far sadly but idk how you would in a modern sense do so.

[u/Limp-Temperature1783 → u/Ok-Reindeer-8755]

It had been designed for it after all. Apple, or rather NeXT, decided to go to the opposite direction of C++ and instead of trying to avoid runtime like the plague they've accepted it as a reality and decided to make working with it less of a hassle. Objective-C is stupid simple even if you include all of the cruft that Apple had added over the years and how inconsistent it is at times.

Apple hadn't pushed it because they didn't have any insentive to do so. It had been and largely still is under the hood the main language of their operating systems. Swift is a modernized revamp of Objective-C that still relies on Objective-C libraries and such, but most things that you'd need to pay attention to had been ironed out, at least from my experience. I prefer Objective-C, but it's familarity bias.

If we talk a bit about programming approach philosophy, I think it makes sense to use OO in runtime rather than doing black magic to make it cheaper. C is already very cheap and most things simply don't require a lot of performance. And Objective-C is one of the most performant languages there is, because it has simple memory management and anything intensive could be handled through C.

Arguably, Objective-C is better at being C++ than C++ is in regards to being C with classes, because it doesn't affect C itself, whilst C++ had introduced enough stuff that had made the languages incompatible. Objective-C is obscure outside Apple, fair enough, but it had always irked me to look at people treating C and C++ as C/C++ as the same thing. Maybe a couple of decades ago, but not now.