1. Comparison to C¶

What differentiates Crowbar from C?

1.1. Removals¶

Some of the footguns and complexity in C come from misfeatures that can simply not be used.

Some constructs in C are almost always the wrong thing.

Some constructs in C exhibit implicit behavior that should instead be made explicit.

typedef
Octal escape sequences
Using an assignment operator (=, +=, etc) or (postfix) ++ and -- as components in a larger expression
The conditional operator ?:
Preprocessor macros (but constants are fine)

Some type modifiers in C exist solely for the purpose of enabling optimizations which most compilers can do already.

Some type modifiers in C only apply in very specific circumstances and so aren’t important.

Some C features are footguns by default, so Crowbar ensures that they are only used correctly.

Unions are not robust by default. Crowbar offers two types of union declarations: a tagged union (the default) and a fragile union for interoperability purposes.

C’s syntax isn’t perfect, but it’s usually pretty good. However, sometimes it just sucks, and in those cases Crowbar makes changes.

C’s variable declaration syntax is far from intuitive in nontrivial cases (function pointers, pointer-to-const vs const-pointer, etc). Crowbar uses simplified type syntax to keep types and variable names distinct.
_Bool is just bool, _Complex is just complex (why drag the preprocessor into it?)
Adding a _ to numeric literals as a separator
All string literals, char literals, etc are UTF-8
Octal literals have a 0o prefix (never 0O because that looks nasty)

C is generous with memory in ways that are unreliable by default. Crowbar adds memory safety conventions to make correctness the default behavior.
C’s conventions for error handling are unreliable by default. Crowbar adds error propagation to make correctness the default behavior.