alt Hacker News> Go is a better C already
It’s not. Garbage collection made sure of it. I believe everyone agrees that a "better C" has to have manual memory management. Most even rule out Go as a systems language because of GC.
Of course, I’m pretty sure Go is much better than C at some problems. But there’s no way in hell it supersedes it.
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> I believe everyone agrees that a "better C" has to have manual memory management.
This seems completely wrong. Manual memory management is perhaps C's most famous issue. I'm sure _someone_ thinks manual memory management is a feature rather than a bug, but I don't think there's any broad consensus about this at all.
Moreover, Go gives you a lot of levers to control your allocations, and with some care (probably less care than writing correct C code) you can avoid allocating at all (this is how Go's own runtime works).
> Of course, I’m pretty sure Go is much better than C at some problems. But there’s no way in hell it supersedes it.
C is great when you need to do manual memory management. Most software written today doesn't need to do manual memory management. (And frankly, for the typical software project, manual memory management is a liability.)
Nope, only the anti-GC religion would agree to that.
Most of those folks would never manage to replicate something like Xerox Cedar on their own, from 1980 in their beloved 2026 computers.
Thankfully we have the likes of Apple and Google, that have a my way or the highway education system for such developers, that want to go through their magical gardens.