C's popularity is due to the fact that it is predictable within certain bounds (single thread or limited concurrency).
Your post, and reading a discussion further down about Rust's reference counting, has made me realize something primitive that Rust is getting right--a real move forward--which even those who don't enjoy the default "safety switch" being flipped from C (like me) may agree.
The C model for memory in time and space is so clean for heap data and the function call stack for one thread (plus global registers), but C has no community-understood/concurring model when it comes to concurrency.
Rust, older C++ libraries, C malloc implementations, and other are all alluding toward the simple memory model for multiple threads, which is reference counted pointers, IMO. Basically use a separate type of pointer for heap data, where the max size of the heap is divided by whatever binary power of 2^p processors exist.
Rust folks or other languages are welcome to add more ownership semantics or whatever, but the whole family of languages could benefit by this extension to the lingua Franca of C.
We may not even need to add a new nominal pointer type to C, just by fiat understand and expect shared, free store objects to always live inside the lowest 1/p th portion of the word address space.
Your post, and reading a discussion further down about Rust's reference counting, has made me realize something primitive that Rust is getting right--a real move forward--which even those who don't enjoy the default "safety switch" being flipped from C (like me) may agree.
The C model for memory in time and space is so clean for heap data and the function call stack for one thread (plus global registers), but C has no community-understood/concurring model when it comes to concurrency.
Rust, older C++ libraries, C malloc implementations, and other are all alluding toward the simple memory model for multiple threads, which is reference counted pointers, IMO. Basically use a separate type of pointer for heap data, where the max size of the heap is divided by whatever binary power of 2^p processors exist.
Rust folks or other languages are welcome to add more ownership semantics or whatever, but the whole family of languages could benefit by this extension to the lingua Franca of C. We may not even need to add a new nominal pointer type to C, just by fiat understand and expect shared, free store objects to always live inside the lowest 1/p th portion of the word address space.