Rust is the sole _potential_ C competitor I've come across but the language isn't even finalized last I checked so it hardly constitute a challenge to C as of yet. A new language showing up doesn't mean it will gain any traction.
As for the higher level languages closing the gap, that is certainly not my experience and I've seen no benchmarks to this effect. And I'm not talking about Python or Ruby and the likes which are in an entirely different category, I'm talking about C#, Java, etc. They are still alot slower on cpu intensive code, also they certainly doesn't fulfill other important properties of C like small memory footprint.
The notion that there was some 'magic piece of the puzzle' missing which has been solved in making high level languages perform like low level languages like C comes across as nonsense to me. Higher level languages sacrifice speed for convenience and safety, depending on your demands that can often be a very wise sacrifice, in the areas where C excels it's likely often not.
Also cell-phones (which are really the upper-end of 'embedded') run a kernel and system-level code written in C doing the heavy lifting system-wise, also performance demanding applications (higher-end games) are often still written in native code on these phones.
There's certainly room for a more 'modern' C, maybe something else has replaced C in 10 years, but I don't see it being any of the languages we are discussing today, not even Rust. As it stands, I think C will remain dominant in the aforementioned domains.
Guess we are going to have to disagree, history will prove one of us right I suppose :)
I don't know, Rust has Mozilla behind it, and lots of active development and (for a new programming language) a pretty decent community.
ATS is hosted on SourceForge, and looks to be someone's research project. That's totally fine, and it may actually be _better_, but the real world often doesn't care about better.
If I was a betting man, I'd be putting chips down on Rust. (and I sort of am...)
That said, the more programming languages the merrier!
Rust may be more successful but at this time ATS is a better C replacement. Mainly because Rust is currently tied to a runtime and garbage collector. But also because ATS has better features for describing the API boundaries when calling into C and back (ie. FFI).
Rust will grow into these areas I'm sure because Mozilla will need them for Servo and safer programming.
It's high-level assembly language. Thus, it allows you to write code with a very small barrier between you and the machine instructions, but with enough of a barrier that you can reuse and organize your code logically. At the same time, it gives you most of the speed and raw bit manipulation of machine code.
The negatives about C:
You're almost as likely to introduce completely silent catastrophic memory corruption with every operation than you are to actually accomplish the task you're trying to do. Most of the things which would normally be bugs are also now major security breaches. C's structure also makes it extremely difficult to do static analysis, making it difficult to find bugs, security vulnerabilities, and make performance optimizations.
How ATS helps:
ATS addresses a lot of these issues by emitting efficient C code. However, at a higher level ATS combines C with an extremely strong type system (dependent typing) which allows you to do things like verify statically that there are no out-of-bound memory accesses through typing. It can do even stronger things like prove your code correct.
ATS provides all the low level hackery that C can do but allows more information to be encoded in types to ensure that is safe. It also provides high level features from functional programming languages like higher order functions, pattern matching, etc.
As for the higher level languages closing the gap, that is certainly not my experience and I've seen no benchmarks to this effect. And I'm not talking about Python or Ruby and the likes which are in an entirely different category, I'm talking about C#, Java, etc. They are still alot slower on cpu intensive code, also they certainly doesn't fulfill other important properties of C like small memory footprint.
The notion that there was some 'magic piece of the puzzle' missing which has been solved in making high level languages perform like low level languages like C comes across as nonsense to me. Higher level languages sacrifice speed for convenience and safety, depending on your demands that can often be a very wise sacrifice, in the areas where C excels it's likely often not.
Also cell-phones (which are really the upper-end of 'embedded') run a kernel and system-level code written in C doing the heavy lifting system-wise, also performance demanding applications (higher-end games) are often still written in native code on these phones.
There's certainly room for a more 'modern' C, maybe something else has replaced C in 10 years, but I don't see it being any of the languages we are discussing today, not even Rust. As it stands, I think C will remain dominant in the aforementioned domains.
Guess we are going to have to disagree, history will prove one of us right I suppose :)