Hmm...those who don't understand Objective-C are doomed to reinvent it, badly? (Yes, have used OO C techniques of different sorts and implemented ObjC compiler/runtime).
Object-oriented techniques in C
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Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#22Do NOT use these techniques please! I have experience of an early nineties project that was entirely structured like this and trust me, it ends up as a disaster. C is not meant to be OO, consequently all the tooling in editors and the like do not understand the links between classes and methods. What it ends up like is an impenetrable mess with all the mechanics of C++ exposed but being impossible to navigate. again.…
Bah. It's a tool. Just like any tool, you should have it in your toolbox, and use it when appropriate.
When I hear about C programs that were a disaster because they used OO-like techniques, the operative word is usually "disaster" and not "C" or "OO". In other words, there were other things wrong with the project that had nothing to do with the selection of language or programming paradigm, like hiring inexperienced programmers or mandating a single programming paradigm for the whole codebase.
Good C code will have a lot fewer objects than say, Java, because most of the things you want to use C for, you can accomplish just fine with structs and functions. But you shouldn't shy away from a struct full of function pointers or an ADT with opaque pointer types and appropriately-namespaced member functions just because you're afraid a maintenance programmer won't get it. It's their responsibility to learn the language.
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#23Hmm...those who don't understand Objective-C are doomed to reinvent it, badly? (Yes, have used OO C techniques of different sorts and implemented ObjC compiler/runtime).
Isn't this article's implementation of OO C based on C++?
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#24This is probably a stupid question, but here it goes: Embedded platforms tend to have size limits. Would this increase the size of the source code? Seems a bit verbose to me.
The size increase by using these techniques would be far smaller than linking in libstdc++. libc is much smaller than libstdc++, especially when you need to support dynamic code and do a whole-archive on your libraries in the executable.
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#25Do NOT use these techniques please! I have experience of an early nineties project that was entirely structured like this and trust me, it ends up as a disaster. C is not meant to be OO, consequently all the tooling in editors and the like do not understand the links between classes and methods. What it ends up like is an impenetrable mess with all the mechanics of C++ exposed but being impossible to navigate. again.…
Wierd, in the 90's we did a rather large, successful medical imaging product using techniques like these. If you had a CT or MRI scan in the 90s and early 00s, your images were likely rendered for the tech/radiologist using this type of code.
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#26A part a of series of articles on HN: How to %feature_from_c++% in C (when you could have used C++)
or when memory constraints prevent you from using libstdc++
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#27Isn't there some way to emit C from C++? Wouldn't a capability like that and using C as a host language completely bypass the need for emulating OOP in C, by just letting you write C++? That seems like it would be far more manageable, and since it's compiled, not susceptible to some of the major downsides commonly associated with the technique (in JS).
The emitted code is highly name mangled - one of the reasons why you encapsulate the C code in "extern C"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_mangling
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#28This interesting article reminded me of this post by Rob Pike from some time ago:
https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/hoJdanihKwb.
While I've been a C++ programmer since my uni days, I think algorithms and data structures should come first, and I don't like the idea of "bending" programs to make them fit nicely within the OO paradigm.
Re: Object-oriented techniques in C
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saddened by the author going to this trouble. Embedded cpu selection doesn't happen in isolation - or at least, it shouldn't. The available tools are a large part of why you would pick chip A over chip B. If you don't have a C++ compiler, and you end up having to re-invent C++ in C, then maybe you should have picked the chip with decent tools. If this project really did require re-inventing C++ in C, it must be j…
> If you don't have a C++ compiler, and you end up having to re-invent C++ in C, then maybe you should have picked the chip with decent tools. So the software engineers are the only ones on the project who get a say as to what chips get used?
No (and that isn't what he said), but surely they should get a say, right?