Why bother with C in 2026? It is, he said, still a great language. C is portable, stable over the long term, offers fast compilation, and the resulting binary code is fast. "What you see is what you get"; it is easy to look at C code and have some idea of what the computer will actually do. There are a lot of tools for working with the language, and C gets out of the way when necessary.
C does have a long history, and that affects the language as we see it today, he said. The C89 standard had to cope with a wide variety of hardware, including machines with signed-magnitude or one's-complement integer representations, segmented memory, exotic pointer representations, and surprising sizes for types. Some Honeywell machines, for example, had nine-bit bytes. That greatly complicated the task of writing a standard that would enable the writing of portable code.
