C in recent years

[capr]

This is targeted at C compiler writers, which these days means GCC and LLVM people.

Compiler writers are serving the standards people instead of serving their actual users. Standards people don't understand their users because most of them don't have any experience producing actual shippable software. The "spherical cow in a vacuum" that is the C abstract machine combined with the ever-growing plague of undefined behavior has made this language close to unusable in recent years.

All of this wouldn't matter if C would die, but this beast is hard to kill, the core language being too good for its own sake even though everything around it sucks: the preprocessor, the standard library, the endless build systems, programmers that insist that I shouldn't assume that a char has 8 bits (and they'll even quote me the verse in the C quran where it says that, as the good scholars of the standards that they are).