About Some Innovations of the C Programming Language Standard C23
K. A. Kostiukhin, G. L. Levchenkova, S. V. Samborskii · PROGRAMMNAYA INGENERIA · 2025
The article discusses some of the innovations of the C23 standard that are relevant to programmers. Tests have been proposed and implemented to verify these innovations on the latest (at the time of writing) version of the popular GCC and clang compilers. A forecast is made regarding the further standardization of the C language. It can be noted that the GCC and clang compilers mainly support the C23 standard. Some inconsistencies and problems were found. If we try to somehow summarize the C23 standard with one idea, then, perhaps, this is a movement towards the "universality" or "self-sufficiency" of the C language. I.e., in order to implement in C typical tasks, you should have an idea about the hardware (processor and peripherals), the assembly language, the format of object files and the operating system. This is justified when it comes to system programming, but, according to the authors, there is another place for the C language, it is an effective (both in productivity and in memory) replacement for languages like Java and C++. At the same time, it is desirable that the programmer is not required to know anything other than the standard C language. Many of the features added to the C language by the C23 standard can be discussed from this point of view. Another trend that can be traced in different parts of C23 is the influence of C++. In addition to unifying the syntax in the form of new keywords, there are also more obvious examples of C++ influence. The future of the C23 standard is interesting. Each proposed innovation can immediately turn out to be generally accepted, or become the subject of long, lively discussions, or never be used by anyone. What of these features exactly will be successful will become clear in a few years.