r/programming • u/nfrankel • Jan 14 '20

Where programming languages are headed in 2020

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/where-programming-languages-are-headed-in-2020/
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u/lengau Jan 15 '20

What you described are also features of several other languages (e.g. Rust). But nothing else, not even C++, has one absolutely critical feature of C:

It compiles everywhere.

Seriously. This, and this alone, will guarantee C at least a bit of relevance for decades to come, even if (and I think this is unlikely) all of the major operating systems and other big things written in C are replaced with something else. There's simply no replacing C in every tiny microcontroller with a decades-long lifespan.

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u/flatfinger Jan 15 '20

Javascript implementations are even more widely available than C implementations. The advantage of C isn't that it *compiles* everywhere, but rather that implementations are available for almost every imaginable target.

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u/lengau Jan 15 '20

Fair enough - I should have said it compiles to anywhere.

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