&quot;but rather in a direction that is beneficial mainly to a small incumbent minority.&quot;<p>The majority of C programmers seem to fight changes to the permissive way of doing things in name of efficiency and compatibility. I don&#x27;t know what the interplay between them, compiler writers, and standards bodies is. Yet, it seems C programmers react pretty negatively to anything changing their language even here. Just imagine how much of UNIX or GCC might break if we did pre-fixed strings, a reversed stack, compiler-only pointer arithmetic, auto-bounds checks, and so on. It would all just... COLLAPSE.<p>&quot;yet it is virtually impossible to write secure code in C or C++, not because it would violate the laws of physics or some mathematical theorem, but because both the standards and the implementations are hopelessly brain-damaged.&quot;<p>Totally agree there that this is what resulted. Recently, on a new platform, I needed to code up something that C programmers can read and I can&#x27;t remember C worth crap. So, I decided to re-learn FreeBASIC cuz even it&#x27;s easier to get right than C &amp; I straight up can&#x27;t stand C. Coding style wasn&#x27;t... modern... but worked, was type-safe, iterated fast, ran in milliseconds, and was very readable. Stuff I can never say collectively about C without state-of-the-art tooling on 4-8 core machine with RAM disks. ;)