A simple defer feature for C
Features that seem like a good idea at the time often don&#x27;t stand the test of time 20-30 years in the future. In the mid-90s Object-Oriented Programming was super-hyped so a bunch of other languages bolted on OO, such as Fortran and Ada. But now we have Go&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;Zig rejecting brittle OO taxonomies because you always end up having a DuckBilledPlatypus that &quot;is a&quot; Mammal and &quot;is a&quot; EggLayer.<p>A great strength of C is that if you want more features you just go to a subset of C++, no need to add them to C. C++ is the big, ambitious, kitchen-sink language. When C++ exists we don&#x27;t need to bloat C.<p>Fortran was originally carefully designed so that people who aren&#x27;t compiler experts can generate very fast (and easily parallelized) code working with arrays the intuitive and obvious way. But later Fortran added OO and pointers making it much harder to auto-parallelize and avoid aliasing slowdown. Now that GPUs are rising it turns out that the original Fortran model of everything-is-array-or-scalar works really well for automatically offloading to the GPU. GPUs don&#x27;t like method-lookup tables, nor do they like lambdas which are equivalent to stateful Objects with a single Apply method.<p>Scientists are moving to CUDA now, which on the GPU side deletes all these features that Fortran was bloated with. Now nVidia offers proprietary CUDA Fortran which is much more in the spirit of original Fortran, deleting OO and pointers for code that runs on GPU. If the ISO standards committee didn&#x27;t ruin ISO Fortran for scientific computing by bloating it with trendy features we could all be running ISO Fortran automatically on CPUs and GPUs with identical code (or just a few pragmas) and not be locked in to proprietary nVidia CUDA.<p>But GPUs are now mainly used for crypto greed instead of science for finding cancer cures or making more aerodynamic aircraft so maybe it all doesn&#x27;t matter anyway.