Sure, C could be much better right now. In some incredible way people that are able to drive the future of C made all the worst choices, undermining the language instead of improving it, for most parts (with undefined behaviours).
C just needs:
1. A solid and modern standard library, with basic data structures, sane strings, higher level sockets, ...
2. A very simple object system. No inheritance, no advanced features at all, just the ability to call object->method(1,2,3) and getting a 'self' reference.
3. Ability to perform operations on function exit in order to clean-up locally allocated things. So as I allocate things or open files and alike, I can specify some cleanup code doing things like if (fp) fclose(fp); that is executed when the function returns in any case.
I read a paper 'What If We Don’t Pop the Stack? The Return of
2nd-Class Values' where they discuss their research into delaying popping the stack to allow functions to return data allocated on the stack. As a small brained embedded primate that doesn't use malloc that sort of thing would make C vastly easier to use.
If C hadn't been standardized by ISO, I wonder if C implementors would have eventually added stuff like this just because they found it useful.
Or if C had been standardized, but C++ didn't exist, maybe they would have added features like this simply because contemporary languages like Object Pascal and Ada 95 supported object oriented programming better in practice.
There are other OOP paradigms, no need to force 'this' pointers on everyone like C++ does. Both 2 and 3 could be done with semantic-aware macros instead.
I believe the C++ way would be the right thing for C. Note that this does not mean in any way to inherit all the stuff from C++, nor even constructors and stuff like that. Simply a way to avoid doing this:
list_add(&mylist,1);
But instead:
mylist->add(1);
Note that doing this is not an option:
mylist->class->add(&mylist,1);
It's not just ugly (even if often used), but also uses an additional pointer, which in some application (like Redis) is a no-go because of memory usage.
Perhaps, though I think one should be careful, as reproducing C++ in this fashion runs awfully close to reproducing what I see as C++'s largest sin...
Let me explain, I feel iteration speed is of utmost importance. So C++'s mistake of mixing interface and implementation (data layout specifically) leads to massive include bloat, and ultimately contributes significantly to the compilation time problem in C++. In contrast, in C, functions are almost entirely decoupled from structure data layout, and implementation, this promoting much more svelte headers and reduced compilation time for many projects.
So, IMO, it would be important to seperate object interface, from the layout, or risk a major, if not the most major, advantage of using C over C++
C just needs:
1. A solid and modern standard library, with basic data structures, sane strings, higher level sockets, ...
2. A very simple object system. No inheritance, no advanced features at all, just the ability to call object->method(1,2,3) and getting a 'self' reference.
3. Ability to perform operations on function exit in order to clean-up locally allocated things. So as I allocate things or open files and alike, I can specify some cleanup code doing things like if (fp) fclose(fp); that is executed when the function returns in any case.