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by nateb2022·4y ago·view on hn ↗
Just following up on this, in my opinion there would be more value in writing better C compilers and cross-compilation toolchains, linting tools, static analysis and optimization tools, and alternative standard libraries, than doing things like starting a new language altogether (e.g. Rust, Go, V, etc. etc.)

This is not to say that those languages don't have value: they are awesome and I am very attached to a couple.

However I still recognize that they are all trying to do something right by reinventing the wheel. Rather than building a "new" C from scratch, I think it would be better for everyone if we built on top of C.

1 comments
One constraint C has is its ABI. Bolin compilation model is different (article went up last week) and being constrained by it would be pointless. C allows unsigned variables to wrap, bolin doesn't (not enforced yet, beta is 0.1.0). If my team and I wanted to compete with speed we'd be handicapped by C constrains. This current article shows a reason why you might want to use posix read instead of fread/fgets, the Bolin compiler doesn't use libc or any other lib at the moment because we wanted it to be fast and because we knew we'd be writing our own libraries.

How do you suppose people can get rid of constrains that would make their language slower? I hear the whole reason carbon exist is because google couldn't get the C++ committee to budge on ABI