<story><title>Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan Answer Questions on Go</title><url>http://features.slashdot.org/story/15/11/18/1748247/interviews-alan-donovan-and-brian-kernighan-answer-your-questions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agentultra</author><text>Kernighan&amp;#x27;s response to the C question was rather odd -- where is this myth that C is only used in embedded systems and drivers coming from?&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel is still written in C.&lt;p&gt;Ben Klemens, author of 21st Century C, leads the statistical computing group for the research arm of the U.S. Census Bureau. He models complex systems and computations in C.&lt;p&gt;The entire Python scientific computing stack is resting on C.&lt;p&gt;A huge portion of the GHC compiler is written in C.&lt;p&gt;Many AAA game developer studios are writing their engines in C (with vendor supplied C++ compilers, but C none-the-less).&lt;p&gt;And do people really write C89 for greenfield projects today? C99 is pretty amazing and has added some great features to the language. C11 &lt;i&gt;might&lt;/i&gt; be the trivial change having only added some atomic operators (depending on whether you think this is trivial) and rescinding VLAs (though most compilers will probably continue to support them anyway).&lt;p&gt;I think Go is a perfectly fine language but it seems like perhaps the group is a little out of touch with the rest of the world judging by replies to questions like this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lobster_johnson</author><text>Kernighan wasn&amp;#x27;t the one claiming that C was mostly used for embedded systems and drivers; that was the guy who posed the question. Kernighan only agreed that C is still popular in that space.&lt;p&gt;As for C99, I would love to see some hard stats about rate of adoption. Personally I can&amp;#x27;t imagine starting out on a new project and &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; use C99, but then the hard-core C contingency is a pretty conservative bunch. (Are there still systems where you can&amp;#x27;t get a C99 compiler?)</text></comment>
<story><title>Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan Answer Questions on Go</title><url>http://features.slashdot.org/story/15/11/18/1748247/interviews-alan-donovan-and-brian-kernighan-answer-your-questions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agentultra</author><text>Kernighan&amp;#x27;s response to the C question was rather odd -- where is this myth that C is only used in embedded systems and drivers coming from?&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel is still written in C.&lt;p&gt;Ben Klemens, author of 21st Century C, leads the statistical computing group for the research arm of the U.S. Census Bureau. He models complex systems and computations in C.&lt;p&gt;The entire Python scientific computing stack is resting on C.&lt;p&gt;A huge portion of the GHC compiler is written in C.&lt;p&gt;Many AAA game developer studios are writing their engines in C (with vendor supplied C++ compilers, but C none-the-less).&lt;p&gt;And do people really write C89 for greenfield projects today? C99 is pretty amazing and has added some great features to the language. C11 &lt;i&gt;might&lt;/i&gt; be the trivial change having only added some atomic operators (depending on whether you think this is trivial) and rescinding VLAs (though most compilers will probably continue to support them anyway).&lt;p&gt;I think Go is a perfectly fine language but it seems like perhaps the group is a little out of touch with the rest of the world judging by replies to questions like this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>Also of course Python itself is in C as well. Other language VM&amp;#x2F;runtimes are developed in C as well (Erlang, Lua?)</text></comment>