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If I remember correctly he had much more examples somewhere, but I am not sure this was ever shared in public.

C has its unique advantages that make some of us prefer it to C++ or Rust or other languages. But it also has some issues that can be addressed. IMHO it should evolve, but very slowly. C89 is cert…

I don't think so. As a contributor to GCC, I also wished it hadn't.

We will likely decide in March that it will became an ISO TS. Given the simplicity of the feature and its popularity, I would assume that it will become part of the standard eventually.

I do not see how defer would have helped in this case.

The advantage is that it automatically adds the cleanup code to all exit paths, so you can not forget it for some. Whether this is really that helpful is unclear to me. When we looked at defer origin…

It is not clear to me that defer helps here. The issue is management of state (the return value) not control flow.

It is not yet a technical specification, just a draft for one, but this will hopefully change this year, and the defer patch has not been merged into GCC yet. So I guess it will become part of C at s…

IMHO, it is in the best interest of your students to teach them standard C first.

Clang has this and upcoming GCC will also have this: https://godbolt.org/z/KETrPEnT1

You can use pointer types by using a typedef first, but I agree this not nice (I hope we will fix this in future C). But then, I think this is a minor inconvenience for having an otherwise working s…

Only statement expressions, but one can also implement this without them.

Or just do it in C. #define span(T) struct span_##T { size_t len; T *data; } #define span_access(T, x, i) (*({ \ span(T) *_v = (x); \ auto _i = (i)…

In my experience it is worse with clang that even more aggressively uses UB than GCC to optimize (and Chris Lattner in his famous blog post very much justified this line of thinking), and I have seen …

It follows from mathematics and logic that "larger than 40%" could be 100%, but it does not follow that this is likely or reasonable to assume.

In theory. But most C programs do not rely on UB. What is the basis for your claim?

I felt the same. There are too few contributors for GCC. At some point I started to fix the bugs that I had filed myself. Still, it is important that the user make themselves heard.

I know, but this still leaves 60% of programs without such UB which is far from "it is practically impossible find a program without UB". Also this this was a study from 2013 and many of tho…

This is only relevant for specific types of UB, and even there it is not entirely clear. One of the main challenges is ABI compatibility and separate compilation. Both are not necessarily part of the …

I agree. I am not terribly convinced by C++ or Zig's comptime. You should be able to do this at run-time, and then just be able to make it a constant.

C23 did not increase a lot. The core language spec is also very small. Extensions are also often relatively simple, but most importantly, one does not have to use them. ABI is usually not per OS but …

I am not sure what statement you are responding to. I am certainly not arguing that. I disagree with your claim that "it is practically impossible find a program without UB".

Yes, this is the funny thing. People do not want to spend time using a stricter language as already supported by C compilers using compiler flags because "it is waste of time" while others …

I think this is not really true. Or rather, it depends on the UB you are talking about. There is UB which is simply UB because it is out-of-scope for the C standard, and there is UB such as signed in…

Also what I like about C is that is has mature tooling, very portable with multiple implementations, and that is is very stable. I would not use a language for any serious project hat does not offer …

Where there is UB in the standard it means that a C compiler is free to define the behavior. So of course, somebody could write a C implementation which does this. See also Fil-C for a perfectly memor…

Rust is not super appealing to me as C user: too complex, slow compilation, etc.

And please provide feedback to WG14. Also please give feedback and file bugs for GCC / clang. There are users of C in the committee and we need your support. Also keeping C implementable for smal…

Well, I consider it abuse of header files to put an implementation in there. And comparing including a c-file to IOCCC seems very exaggerated. My experience with dependencies in Debian-derived distrib…

People certainly sometimes create a horrible mess. I just do not see that this is a good reason to dumb everything down. With a proper .c/.h split there are many advantages, and in the worst cas…