C23 Standard Sets the World on Fire

Idk, I program in C a lot but mostly embedded so not much realloc(), nevertheless that article seems rather bombastic about what shouldn't be an issue anyway. Zero-size behaviour has always been implementation defined AFAIK, so I never relied on it. "Condoned" is not standard, so you can't use it, simple as that. Also, their "idiomatic" code is NEVER used in this way because realloc()-ing for every push/pop is insane. They know that, because they ask for a better version is their "drill". But when you add a separate size manager, it doesn't take much more to add a check for zero size. To me, it seems like a non-issue, but they essentially build their whole tirade on it.

I think the crucial point is that C has become stratified as a language and is no longer the "high-level assembler", if it ever was. Sure, the example is particular, but it's a good illustration of the tension between, to be honest, C and C++/Rust programmers. It's simply language complexity, mostly intended to benefit the idiomatic preferences and stratospheric levels of optimisation that make the already difficult positively dangerous, and it's befitting a go-faster industry that overwhelmingly represents professional software engineering. I realise this can be seen just as much as "old man yells at cloud" (I'm 40), but C has always been the choice of those who, apart from not having much alternative choice of language for purely practical reasons, simply needed a pragmatic, portable language to implement their performance-critical code, in a way that gives them relative freedom to exercise the platforms they're targeting. It's not, and has never been, an abstract, high-level language, and the industrial efforts at bringing C and C++ together beyond a few token features has been, in my view, a net negative. Rant rant rant, etc.