> I'm sorry, but this is an entirely imagined persecution. Nobody is taking your C compiler away from you. Nobody thinks you're a bad person for using C. Nobody thinks you're a bad programmer for using C.

I've had people say all of these things to me in various ways.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," is a typical phrase used.

> Many of us think there are better alternatives. We're excited about these better alternatives. We want people to use these better alternatives. We think these better alternative solve a lot of problems that many people spend a lot of time dealing with. We think these better alternatives prevent many of the types of bugs that regularly ruin people's afternoons, evenings, and weekends.

This excitement has been over-the-top and as mentioned by one or more people in this thread, it has actually driven people away from Rust. As much as I don't like Rust, I don't want that to happen.

> We really think you should try it out, but if you don't like it, literally nobody is coming to take your compiler away from you.

When people say they want to deprecate C, that's what they mean. If you deprecate C, the compilers will be abandoned, which in the software world converges to the same effect as taking it away because compilers need ongoing maintenance to keep up with new platforms and such.

If a new platform becomes mainstream, and there's no C compiler for it, then my C compiler has effectively been taken away.

This is one reason I'm making my C replacement language: I do think that C will eventually be abandoned on the major platforms, and I want to have switched by that time.

> We do think a lot of the common arguments against moving to these languages are bull** though.

Which is fair. You didn't say all of them are, and yes, a lot of the common arguments are crud.

> "Rust can't do self-referential data structures" is one of them.

I actually agree with you; this is a crud argument. In order to make my C as safe as possible, I don't use self-referential data structures either; I use a parent data structure.

I did this with linked lists [1]. The linked list is a parent data structure that owns everything, and the items in the linked list just have indices to their neighbors. This allows me to tie Rust-like lifetimes to the items.

And any self-referential data structure can be expressed in terms of a parent data structure and children data structures.

So yes, you are right: this argument is crud.

> "I have a ton of expertise in C and it would take more time than I'm willing to spend to get to that level in something else", "this project is already written in C and mature", and "I write code for unsupported platforms" aren't bull**, but they are ones that naturally decay in how compelling they are over time.

I agree. This is another reason I'm still writing a C replacement for myself.

> And as much as I believe you personally can write memory-safe programs in C, I would be willing to bet this guarantee would go out the window the moment you add a second maintainer who can push and release code without you vetting every commit.

Yep. I agree. Even if it's Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, or anyone.

I still vet every commit, or just not accept anything.

It also helps me keep the scope manageable: if I can't do it myself, the scope is too large.

[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/src/contain...