Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

One thing I just can't understand is proactively using the :: syntax. It's sooo ugly with so much unnecessary line noise. Just use a single period! I think one of the best decisions D made was to get of -> and :: and just use . for everything.

Recently gave this language a spin with raylib and libtmx for loading tiled maps. Out of C3, Zig, and Odin, I've had the least trouble integrating C libraries with C3 (rolled my own bindings for libtmx). Overall a big fan of the language and am hoping it gets recognition on the level of the other languages mentioned here.

How does this compare to Zig or Odin, which have the same goals of improving upon C and have gotten occasional publicity here on HN?

tbh I think one of the things I really liked reading through examples was the change in the switch/case behavior. I always thought implicitly falling into the next case was an awful design, and that a break is the more logical implicit behavior except in the case (no pun intended) of stacked empty case statements.

I do all my coding in Python, but if I ever find myself needing to reach for C again, I'll certainly consider this.

EDIT: Though is there a reason why "fn" is needed? I would think the AST builder would still be able to identify the beginning of a function definition without it, and as a programmer, I can identify a function definition easily.

Oh. This actually looks like something I could see myself using, maybe. I thought I'd hate it, but after checking out the examples, this is pretty nice.

There are some syntax choices that aren't ones I'd have made (eg I prefer `ident: Type` and types being uppercase, I don't like `fn type identifier ()` for functions etc), but coming from C, I can see how and why it ended up like it did, and overall this looks really good. Great work!

I have used this language for a few things (csv parsing and some simple personal cli tools). Other than the normal pre-1.0 issues it's great. I wish it had a tagged union type, but it looks like that's planned based on the github issue tracker.

It is a pretty big improvement on C without changing the ABI. Maybe not the improvements I would make if I was smart enough to make a compiler, but better than doing C which I also enjoy despite it's warts.

@lerno, how do you feel about contributions to the standard library? For example, I might add BLAKE2 if it is not already implemented.

Also I just checked the source code of hash map. What if I want to use a different hashing algorithm for "rehash"?

There is no one true implementation of a hash table either, for example, so I am not sure what to do with that. I want a thread-safe hash table, I wonder if it would ever make it into the standard library.

So many of the so-called "C alternatives" end up doing way too much. I don't need algebraic data types or classes or an integrated build system or a package manager.

What I would like to see is a language that is essentially just C with the major design flaws fixed. Remove the implicit casting and obscure integer promotions. Make spiral rule hold everywhere instead of being able to put const at the beginning of the declaration. Make `sizeof()` return a signed type. Don't allow mixed signed/unsigned arithmetic. Make variables/functions private by default i.e. add `public` to make public instead of `static` to make private.

Keep the preprocessor and for the love of god make it easy to invoke the compiler/linker directly so I can write my own Makefile.

Are there any examples of using a C library (binding, FFI) in C3? A quick search came up empty.

Overall, this is one of the better C killers I’ve seen. But keeping macros while ditching conditional compilation? That seems completely backward to me. Oh well.

Hello, your doc about const says "The const qualifier is only retained for actual constant variables".

Then how do you express read-only pointers ? Like C `const int* ptr`

Does it allow you to make functions weak? Can you do something like gcc's constructor attribute?

as much as i like a better 'C' language, it is hard to use them. so many things have been done in C and you find everything in the net you would ever like to use. Using a better 'C' places you on that strange island where no one hears you cry. Using C3 in a company places you in a place where only you can understand the code.

Why the “fn” token?

Does C3's compiler utilise the highly optimized C compilers like clang and gcc similar to Vlang and Nim?

Does it have native fixed point types?

I think any system language going forward really needs three things:

1. Generics / templates

2. Destructors

3. Ownership

It is unfortunate that this only has the first one. There was a language called clay that had all three and kept easy integration with the C ABI, but it seems like that design has been lost.

Any other C alternative or C-like languages that people here are using more than experimentally?

Asking because my above question and this current post about C3 are related to this recent post by me, which had a good number of comments:

Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43223162