Lets be honest: conferences exist to waste time. Nothing productive gets done on conferences and best thing you can take our from them is to socialize with like-minded people.
A ton of open source project work gets done at conferences.
Why Aren't There C Conferences?
71–80 of 383 posts
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#72C is effectively frozen in time, thanks largely to Microsoft's decision to deprioritize C support in favor of C++.
C99 is almost 20 years old and MSVC still doesn't fully support it. Forget about C11. If you're a C programmer who cares about portability, you stick with C89.
There's not a lot of point to having a conference about something that is stuck on a 30 year old standard.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#73Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.
Yes, anything that needs to be fast on low-end hardware. Java and Golang do not exist there.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#74C is effectively frozen in time, thanks largely to Microsoft's decision to deprioritize C support in favor of C++. C99 is almost 20 years old and MSVC still doesn't fully support it. Forget about C11. If you're a C programmer who cares about portability, you stick with C89. There's not a lot of point to having a conference about something that is stuck on a 30 year old standard.
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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#75Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.
There are entire product categories (Games / Databases / Operating Systems / Video editors / Animation / Data analysis tools / robotics) where C/C++ continue to be the dominant languages.
Thanks for the info, but I'm not sure databases belongs in that list. I work on a database system (Couchbase), and our codebase is pretty mixed. The oldest part of the system, the Key-Value storage engine, is C++, but the newer parts are a mix of Erlang, Golang, and Java.
Anyone know what some of the newer systems, like Spark and Snowflake are written in?
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#76C is effectively frozen in time, thanks largely to Microsoft's decision to deprioritize C support in favor of C++. C99 is almost 20 years old and MSVC still doesn't fully support it. Forget about C11. If you're a C programmer who cares about portability, you stick with C89. There's not a lot of point to having a conference about something that is stuck on a 30 year old standard.
MSVC is becoming less and less relevant. People are writing C99 and C11 and MSVC's insistence on breaking portability with modern codebases is incrementally marginalizing it as people switch to compilers that understand their standard compliant code.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so. Poppycock. Codebases should use any and all tools available to them to accomplish their goals, given the tradeoffs. Using non-standard language extensions is a tradeoff, and if it suits the Linux community and their goals, there's nothing wrong with that.
That is one way non-standard extensions become standard.
For example, the [[maybe_unused]] and similar annotations in C++17 grew out of gcc builtins.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how that follows at all. If you're implying all program languages are derived from C, that's simply false. Lisp is based on the lambda calculus and predates C, as one easy counter-example. If you're implying that all languages run on top of C, that's also false. Theoretical Lisp Machines [0] have been envisioned which do not run C anywhere, and many languages (rust, go, etc) can be built into unikernals t…
Show me a lisp which is used by enough people to fill a conference in 2018 that isn't implemented in C. Show me a lisp machine which was manufactured any time in the past 10 years.
Steel Bank Common Lisp and Clozure Common Lisp are both implemented mostly in Lisp with some C code thrown in. And the European Lisp Symposium always has a large share of Common Lisp programmers.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)
I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.
To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#80Lets be honest: conferences exist to waste time. Nothing productive gets done on conferences and best thing you can take our from them is to socialize with like-minded people.
WWDC is like, the only time Apple deigns to expose their own developers to the wider world to share their inside expertise and answer questions.
Not really. Apple developers are regularly seen at other conferences and events.
It's just a PITA to get Legal approval to give presentations.