Is there a better C?

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I want a better C. Let me explain:

I do a lot of programming in C, which is required for applications that have real-time needs such as audio programming, robotics, device drivers, etc.

While I love C, one thing that gets on my nerves after having spent a lot of time with Haskell is the lack of a proper type system. That is, as soon as you want to write a more general-purpose function, say something that manipulates a generic pointer, (like say a generic linked list) you have to cast things to void* or whatever, and you loose all type information. It's an all-or-nothing system, which doesn't let you write generic functions without losing all the advantages of type checking.

C++ doesn't solve this. And I don't want to use C++ anyways. I find OO classes and templates to be a headache.

Haskell and its type classes do solve this. You can have semantically useful types, and use type constraints to write functions that operate on classes of types, that don't depend on void.

But the domain I'm working in, I can't use Haskell, because it's not real-time capable--mostly due to garbage collection. GC is needed because it's very difficult to do functional programming, which is allocation-heavy, without automatic memory management. However, there is nothing specifically in the idea of type classes that goes against C's semantics. I want C, but with Haskell's dependable type system, to help me write well-typed systems. However, I really want C: I want to be in control of memory management, I want to know how the data structures are layed out, I want to use (well-typed) pointer arithmetic, I want mutability.

Is there any language like this? If so, why is it not more popular for low-level programming?

Aside: I know there are some small language experiments in this direction, but I'm interested in things that would be really usable in real-world projects. I'm interesting in growing-to-well-developed languages, but not so much "toy" languages.

I should add, I heard of Cyclone, which is interesting, but I couldn't get it to compile for me (Ubuntu) and I haven't heard of any projects actually using it.. any other suggestions in this vein are welcome.

Thanks!

real-time language-features programming-languages
9 Answers
user_5212380

Rust

Another (real) candidate for a better C is The Rust Programming Language.

Unlike some other suggestions, (Go, Nimrod, D, ...) Rust can directly compete with C and C++ because it has manual memory management and does not require garbage collection (see [1]).

What sets Rust apart is that it has safe manual memory management. (The link is to pc walton's blog, one of Rusts main contributors and generally worth a read ;) Among other things, this means it fixes the billion dollar mistake of nullpointers. Many of the other languages suggested here either require garbage collection (Go) or have garbage collection turned on by default and do not provide facilities for safe manual memory management beyond what C++ provides (Nimrod, D).

While Rust has an imperative heart, it does borrow a lot of nice things from functional languages, for example sum types aka tagged unions. It is also really concerned with being a safe and performance oriented language.

[1] Right now there are two main pointer types owned pointers (like std::unique_ptr in C++ but with better support from the typechecker) and managed pointers. As the name suggests the latter do require task-local garbage collection, but there are thoughts to remove them from the language and only provide them as a library.

EDITED to reflect @ReneSacs comment: Garbage collection is not required in D and Nimrod.

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