Last year saw a proliferation of talks and articles about safety in C++. Lucian Radu Teodorescu gives an overview of these and presents a unified perspective on safety.
But I still agree with your premise that performance isn’t the deciding factor. Which means that other than legacy reasons, C (and C++) really doesn’t have much going for it anymore.
This sounds like it would be hotly disputed by almost anyone you said it out loud to, even if you said it 40 years ago.
I think you’re expressing uninformed and uneducated opinions.
Even Debian’s computer language benchmarks game showcases C consistently outperforming Rust, with some notable exceptions in some key benchmarks.
And Rust was not a thing 40 years ago.
Anyway, I think I proved my point with regards to the silly idea that performance is a decisive trait. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
Nah, 40 years ago this discussion already existed and it was between C and FORTRAN at the time. FORTRAN was often faster than C, precisely because of aliasing rules that Rust now benefits from as well: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/146159/is-fortran-easier-to-optimize-than-c-for-heavy-calculations
Btw, are these the Debian benchmarks you were referring to? Because I can see C and Rust trading blows with one another, but neither taking a consistent lead. Nothing that points to an undisputed performance lead surely. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/rust-gcc.html
But I still agree with your premise that performance isn’t the deciding factor. Which means that other than legacy reasons, C (and C++) really doesn’t have much going for it anymore.