I thought I was building a C replacement. I was wrong
4 hours ago
- The author marketed C3 as a 'C alternative' based on their outdated view of C as a general-purpose application language from the 80s/90s, but today C is primarily used for OS, embedded, and niche libraries.
- OOP and 'methods-first' thinking force upfront architecture that makes refactoring difficult and locks in bad decisions, whereas procedural thinking (like C) allows flexible exploration of problem space.
- The author's experience with PHP showed that OO abstractions are often unnecessary; modern C with arena allocators and dynamic arrays can achieve the same development speed as Turbo Pascal.
- C3 was always intended to be a general-purpose language with C's simplicity and performance but modern ergonomics like dynamic strings/arrays and methods, not just a replacement for C's current niche uses.
- Going forward, C3 will be marketed as a language for building general-purpose applications, not as a 'C alternative', correcting the fundamental marketing mistake.