I have watched some developers giving advice about using C for general software development, i noticed that a not insignificant amount of them are strictly using C89, vaguely gesturing that more recent versions of C are less dependable, or more broken.

I would appreciate if anyone here can explain the specifics, as me not being a C developer (yet) and looking over the source code of some libraries which do heavily use modern C features, for example to have a defer-like macro (using attributes, or the 2 for statement trick), or generic data structures (using manual name mangling).

I understand these examples are strictly not how C is usually used, and are common in other more modern languages, which may turn some developers away from using these, my main question is “why exactly?”.

I don’t mind being given further reading about this, so if you have an article in mind, it too would be greatly appreciated.

note: in the title i referred to C23, but it could be anything post C89/C99 depending on the subject matter.

  • KissYagni@programming.dev
    8·
    3 days ago

    It works. You have hammers and nails. Then, someday, a dude come with the new Hammer23, with better ergonomical grip, colored high density 3 sided head, and so on. Yeah, cool, but I still have the same nails to nail, and my current hammer do the job perfectly. And I drilled a hole in my workbench ten year ago that have the perfect size for my current hammer.