My choice in this situation is indeed C, but every once in a while I hit a problem that makes me yearn for better metaprogramming.
Perfect hashing that you’d ideally use two different approaches for depending on whether the platform has a cheap popcount (hi AArch32), but to avoid complicating the build you give up and emulate popcount instead. Hundreds of thousands of lines of asynchronous I/O code written in a manual continuation-passing style, with random, occasionally problematic blocking synchronization sprinkled all over because the programmer simply could not be bothered anymore to untangle this nested loop, and with a dynamic allocation for each async frame because that’s the path of least resistance. The intense awkwardness of the state-machine / regular-expression code generators, well-developed as they are. Hoping the compiler will merge the `int` and `long` code paths when their machine representations are identical, but not seeing it happen because functions must have unique addresses. Resorting to .init_array—and slowing down startup—because the linker is too rigid to compute this one known-constant value. And yes, polymorphic datastructures.
I don’t really see anybody do noticeably better than C; I think only Zig and Odin (perhaps also Hare and Virgil?) are even competing in the same category. But I can’t help feeling that things could be much better. Then I look at the graveyard of attempted extensions both special-purpose (CPC[1]) and general (Xoc[2]) and despair.
It would be interesting to understand better where language feature are actually needed or helpful, and where the code should be organized differently. I also observe that often cure if worse than the disease.
Perfect hashing that you’d ideally use two different approaches for depending on whether the platform has a cheap popcount (hi AArch32), but to avoid complicating the build you give up and emulate popcount instead. Hundreds of thousands of lines of asynchronous I/O code written in a manual continuation-passing style, with random, occasionally problematic blocking synchronization sprinkled all over because the programmer simply could not be bothered anymore to untangle this nested loop, and with a dynamic allocation for each async frame because that’s the path of least resistance. The intense awkwardness of the state-machine / regular-expression code generators, well-developed as they are. Hoping the compiler will merge the `int` and `long` code paths when their machine representations are identical, but not seeing it happen because functions must have unique addresses. Resorting to .init_array—and slowing down startup—because the linker is too rigid to compute this one known-constant value. And yes, polymorphic datastructures.
I don’t really see anybody do noticeably better than C; I think only Zig and Odin (perhaps also Hare and Virgil?) are even competing in the same category. But I can’t help feeling that things could be much better. Then I look at the graveyard of attempted extensions both special-purpose (CPC[1]) and general (Xoc[2]) and despair.
[1] https://github.com/kerneis/cpc
[2] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/xoc/