Ask HN: Is there a simple and minimal language like C but without its footguns?

Seems like Go might be able to fit your bill. AFAICT the designers of Go has gone out of their way to avoid adding cruft to the language.

Yes it has GC. What is it that you want to build though? Will GC be in the way? If so, I would consider Rust instead.

C is simple, true – but in many cases it seems like that fact pushes the complexity up to higher layers instead.

C still has it’s place in embedded. And our best kernels are currently written in C. Outside of those domains I don’t see much reasons to start a greenfield project in C.

Free Pascal is more elegant, and has runtimes everywhere. Normally you can avoid pointers, however if you need to use them, the syntax makes it easy to see what you're doing.

Strings are memory managed for you, and can even include nulls.

See the Free Pascal project[1], and the Lazarus IDE[2]

1 - https://www.freepascal.org/

2 - https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

What about just picking a subset of C++?

C + smart pointers and container types?

You don't seem to like garbage collectors, or manual memory management (with which you'll get segfaults and double-free issues) or complexity (where the intermediate ground between manual and automatic memory management comes in, with compiler hints, etc.)

This doesn't seem like a satisfiable set of constraints. I'd recommend removing "not garbage collected" from the constraints, as automatic memory management mostly got introduced to reduce footguns.

Pascal, Zig, V and possibly Crystal. Or Das C although arguably that is a subset of D.

V isn't anywhere near finish. The closest thing should be Zig. But that is far from finish as well.

Crystal is more like Go than C. But I mean someone wrote a OS [1] using Crystal in her spare time.

Or just plan old Pascal.

I mean if you are looking for simplicity like C and compiled to machine code you virtually ruled out 95% of all programming languages. Other languages like Lua is simple. But certainly dont fit the bill.

[1] https://github.com/ffwff/lilith