C is So Back: Unbreaking the Charter
summary
Argument: the C committee compares each addition against the charter and often finds tradeoffs between no invention without exception and practical need. C23 subsumes many fixes — endian/bit intrinsics, enum underlying types, real keywords, empty-brace init, checked integer ops (add/sub/mul only), and ~500 new math functions — to address real ABI and safety pain. Pain points remain: undefined behaviour optimizations break OS code, atomics and C++ atomics have ABI mismatches, VLAs and threads see spotty implementation (GCC late, MSVC missing). Overall, many features ship and some work; others require vendor catch‑up.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00C’s resurgence and talk focus
- 1:08C23 updates and ISO process
- 2:33C’s charter and evolving principles
- 9:13Spirit of C in committee debates
- 10:17Criticism of C23
- 14:52Victor’s paper on ISO C
- 15:38Kelly’s critique of C23
- 16:00Failing C’s mission?
- 25:52Variable Length Arrays and VM Types
- 32:14C11 threads: implementation struggles
- 35:51C11 atomics: memory model and ABI
- 44:19Generic functions: origins and usability
- 49:14C23 weaknesses: enums, bit fields, ABI
- 57:18Missing hardware access and Unicode
- 1:00:07C23 improvements and charter future
- 1:08:00Q&A
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