Comment by simonask a day ago
C is entirely as complicated as Rust, if your goal is to write correct software that doesn't crash all the time. It's only a syntactically simple language. Actually making anything interesting with it is _not_ simple.
It depends on the project. Most of the projects I write in C are very simple, and getting them to work reliably is really not a problem at all.
If you are writing more complicated or "interesting" programs, then I agree, C doesn't give you a good set of tools. But if all you are writing is small libraries or utility programs, C is just fine. In these cases, Rust feels like pulling out a sniper rifle to shoot a target a meter in front of your face (i.e., overkill).
If you are writing complex, large, or very mission-critical programs, then Rust is great to have as a tool as well. But we don't have to take such a black and white view to think that Rust is always the best tool for the job. Or C or Zig or whatever languages for that matter.
Every requirement on the types is commented on why it's necessary.
This is a generic method in the middle of some database DSL code that does a bunch of SQL operations on a type safe manner. Code like this takes "SELECT ?+* FROM ?+* WHERE ? ORDER BY ?+* LIMIT ? OFFSET ?", specifically the limit and offset part, and returns a type that will always map to the database column. If the query is selecting a count of how many Foo each Baz references, this will map to a paginated Foo to Baz count type.
The alternative is to manually write this stuff out in SQL, then manually cast the right types into the basic primitives, which is what a language like Zig probably does.
You'll find similar (though sometimes less type-safe) complex code in just about any ORM/DSL, whether it's written in Java or PHP.
I don't think you can accomplish this in C without some kind of recursive macro parser generating either structs or maybe function pointers on the fly. It'd be hell to make that stuff not leak or double free memory, though.
Quite right. I have 35 years of C under my belt. I can write it in my sleep.
But even so, I can't for the life of me write C code that's as safe as Rust. There are just too many ways to make subtle little mistakes here and there, incrementing a typed pointer by a sizeof by mistake thinking it's a uintptr_t, losing track of ownership and getting a use-after-free, messing up atomic access, mutex deadlocks oh my...
And that's with ALL warnings enabled in CLANG. It's even worse with the default warnings.