About type inference coming to the C language as well

Posted Dec 12, 2023 10:43 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: About type inference coming to the C language as well by swilmet
Parent article: Modern C for Fedora (and the world)

The hard part is not the keywords and operators - it's the lifetime annotation system. Lifetimes are a check on what the programmer intended, so have to be possible to write as an annotation to pointer types in the C derived language, but then to be usable force you to have a generics system (since you want many things to be generic over a lifetime) with (at least) covariance and invariance possible to express.

And once you have a generics system that can express covariance and invariance for each item in a set of generic parameters, why wouldn't you allow that to be used for types as well as lifetimes? At which point, you have Rust traits and structs, and most of the complexity of Rust.