C2 Impressions

Recently, I’ve been looking into the C2 programming language.

I want to develop a couple of small¹ programs using the language, in order to get a good feel for it and investigate whether or not it will be a useful tool for me to create games in the future.

There’s a lot of talk about new programming languages all the time, but I find that 99.9% of it is noise. Most of what language designers² seem to be focusing on these days is entirely useless to me and (in my opinion) doesn’t solve real³ problems.

C2 is simple. It’s described as an evolution of C instead of a revolution. I think this is awesome! It’s almost exactly what I want - the ability to program C the way I want without sacrificing any of C’s simplicity or power, but with a few things cleaned up and improved on since C’s creation in the 1970s.

My favorite features so far:

1. No header files

This is a big one. Header files are a huge pain. They make code reuse and sharing hard, they force you to repeat yourself multiple times because of forward declarations, and they encourage you to spend time thinking about meaningless code organization.

2. Member access is always ‘.’, not sometimes ‘->’

Minor tweak, but instead of using “->” to dereference a pointer, you can use “.” just like a normal, by-value struct. This saves a lot of refactoring time, actually.

3. Cleaned-up primitive types

I am always annoyed that I have to write typedefs in every single one of my projects for sized integer types (yes, I know about <inttypes.h>). C2 gets rid of the platform-dependent integer types char, short, int, and long and replaces them with sized types i8, i16, i32, and i64 for signed and u8, u16, u32, and u64 for unsigned.

That’s it! I just wanted to share my initial thoughts. I’m planning to write a few short notes as I get deeper into using the language, so stay posted for those.