Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
If an old timer who used to be good with C wanted to use C again, would they have to learn a whole bunch of weird new stuff or could they pretty much use it like they did back in the stone age (i.e., the 20th century)?<p>Back in the &#x27;80s and &#x27;90s I was pretty good at C. I don&#x27;t think there was anything about the language or the compilers than that I did not understand. I used C to write real time multitasking kernels for embedded systems, device drivers and kernel extensions for Unix, Windows, Mac, Netware, and OS&#x2F;2. I did a Unix port from swapping hardware to paging hardware, rewriting the processes and memory subsystems. I tricked a friend into writing a C compiler. I could hold my own with the language lawyers on comp.lang.c.<p>Somewhere in there I started using C++, but only as a C with more flexible strings, constructors, destructors, and &quot;for (int i = ...)&quot;, and later added STL containers to that.<p>Sometime in the 2000s, I ended up spending more and more time on smaller programs that were mostly processing text, and Perl became my main tool. Also I ended up spending a lot of helping out less experiences people at work who were doing things in PHP, or JavaScript, or Java. My C and C++ trickled to nothing.<p>I&#x27;ve occasionally looked at modern C++, but it is so different from what I was doing back in &#x27;90s or even early &#x27;00s I sometimes have to double check that I&#x27;m actually looking at C++ code.<p>Is modern C like that, or is it still at its core the same language I used to know well?