I'd say if you want to attend a C conference, check one of the BSD gatherings. Lots of good C code, everything open source, and a great community
Why Aren't There C Conferences?
191–200 of 383 posts
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ones written in Lisp I have some of these exotic Lisp Machines from the 80s which run no C code by default and where the C compiler is optional and written in Lisp. ;-) Obviously exotic and outdated. An alternate world. > I haven't seen a popular lisp yet with a meaningful amount of assembly in lieu of C. https://github.com/Clozure/ccl/tree/master/level-0/ARM And, yes, the assembler is written in Lisp, too.
You missed "popular". Very cool, though.
Relative to the Lisp world, Clozure CL is relatively 'popular'. ;-)
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. C programmers don't define themselves as C programmers mainly. They are firmware developers, game developers or something else. That's where their real interest is.
It's like how they have hamburger restaurants, where you can ask for a hamburger without the pickle, instead of having hamburger without pickle restaurants. C is the burger, bacon, bun, lettuce, tomato, onions and sauces, and ++ is the pickle.
I think you swapped the complexity that each language provides. If C is anything, it's the patty, and C++ literally everything else that makes up the burger.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#194Earlier 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…
Okay, I'll amend my position from "Everything is based on C", to "Everything is based on C except for a handful of LISP machines that nobody cares about but a handful of fundamentalists". At which point someone who collects antique UNIVACs will tell me I'm wrong, too.
C is not the first programming language out there, you know. And for its first decade it wasn't even the most popular. There are still architectures in production and use that you'd struggle to find a conformant C compiler for.
It's really bizarre how you expect the world to revolve around it.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#195Not sure about conferences, but what bothers me is that there is no single acknowledged discussion group about C, after Google destroyed newsgroups and comp.lang.c with it. There should be a very popular Reddit sub about it, but yet Reddit is not enough standard among developers, unfortunately. Right now there is: * https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/c_language/
I'm unsure what you mean by Google "destroying" newsgroups. Newsgroups were decentralized to begin with, the fact that Google purchased Deja News and then didn't... I don't know, turn it into a Reddit-equivalent or something doesn't surprise me. You can still use Google Groups as a Usenet gateway and there are still other Usenet gateways around, although the offerings are getting a bit more scarce and it's no longer…
Maybe "killed" is a strong word. My feeling is that when Google exposed that part of the internet to the web, it became interesting for spammers to target USENET much more than in the past, which was a very strong contributing factor for USENET to die. Moreover once no longer an "hidden gem" many felt exposed posting to USENET, now that it was trivially web accessible.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think that making connections with people working on same things you do is waste of time you’ve got another thing coming. But yeah nobody writes code at conferences, I thought that was pretty obvious.
> But yeah nobody writes code at conferences steveklabnik in another comment: "A ton of open source project work gets done at conferences".
To be clear, I mean both. IMO, the "social" work is the more valuable work that gets done, things like discussing proposals, working on new ideas, coordination between different projects, that kind of thing. Code happens too, of course, and sometimes, the ability to pair in person with someone you're not usually located near can be invaluable.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno- I just got back from rubyconf where I both gave and watched talks on metaprogramming with no web focus at all. There was a great illustrated talk featuring lemurs that was just a walkthrough of rebuilding various enumerable methods with reduce. Other ones that I went to: - a "how ruby's GC works" talk - A deep dive into how a core dev found + fixed memory usage in ruby - The unexpected pitfalls of sublassing…
A couple members of my team attended and we made a friendly wager before they attended: how many conference attendees would be primarily Rails developers? We guessed respectively 25%, 50%, 75% (my guess). Based on some very, very, very fuzzy sampling, they estimated it was somewhere around 50%. Any guess yourself? Are you a Rails dev?
Ruby is used in a lot of places where Rails isn't, by a few large companies. The one that comes to mind is Stripe, which has at least a couple hundred engineers writing Ruby code that has nothing to do with web development (much less Rails).
While Rails certainly did a huge amount to make the language popular, there's lots of things Ruby is good at aside from concatenating snippets of HTML.
Actually, that being said, while maybe 90% of personal Ruby projects don't use Rails, a good half use ActiveRecord in some capacity. I wonder how much that makes it a Rails project, by some reasonable definition.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, check out TI's C++ support for their DSPs. Last time I checked they were so behind the curve they didn't even support templates.
That might because they are targeting Embedded C++, which explicitly eschews these features.
Full C++11 support has been on their roadmap for years. http://e2e.ti.com/support/tools/ccs/f/81/t/542711
And IMO, the final Embedded C++ spec is such a terrible idea that it doesn't absolve them. Having written a C++14 RTOS, if I had to give up multiple inheritance, namespaces, sane casts, and templates, I would have just written the damn thing in C to start off with. The value proposition of institutionalized C with Classes doesn't do it for me.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYqbgvHfxjM for what you need to do to have C level perf while using the type system to still get you something.
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
In older gear using vacuum tubes, it was common to have an a battery to power the circuit, and a b battery to power the tubes.
It was actually more the case that the B battery was the "main" battery, and the A and C batteries being there just for the tubes. The A battery was for the cathode heater/filament - it was the one that needed to be big, since its job was to create a lot of heat - and the C, if present, was for grid bias. The main positive rail would be called B+ in a schematic, even for mains-powered equipment, the same way that Vcc…
Thanks. I had them backwards. I had one of these portable radios as a kid.
Been a long time. :D
Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
The game engine segment is much like the operating system segment - the size, momentum/inertia of the incumbents (ie. UE4, Unity as an analog to Linux, Windows etc) make it rather difficult for new entrants, especially for ones written in languages that are not as popular as C or C++ (eg. Rust). It's simply too hard right now to find enough programmers proficient in Rust who could assemble a competing product, IMHO.
Honest question: for these performance critical things, how good are compilers for Rust, Go etc. compared to modern C/C++ compilers? One reason that Fortran is still so heavily used in HPC is the quality of the compilers.
The Rust compiler uses LLVM, and so fares roughly as well as clang.