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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#221

Post by _bohm »

johan_larson wrote: post #75
dman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Spark is mostly written in Scala.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#222

Post by SiVal »

mikestew wrote: post #19

Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors at the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on "Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning", but there are no conferences about hammers. Don't forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they'll have hammer vendors, too. I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sens…

To find the answer, I would ask, Why are there conferences for other technologies? What are they for?

And I think the answer is probably 1) get useful news about recent and upcoming changes and 2) to socialize. I'm going to guess--possibly just projecting--that most C developers are older and not terribly interested in meeting new "C friends" or jumping into some hot, new "C startup".

That leaves #1. Web/AI-ML/cloud/mobile tech conferences feature speakers from the big tech companies that might reveal, in a talk or a hallway chat, info about which of your problems they are about to solve or to cause. Independent speakers serve a sort of journalist role of gathering intel from the big companies, organizing it, and revealing their findings. It's all about "tell me what I need to know so I can decide what to do".

But there isn't much news about C that most C programmers will want to know in order to make decisions. It's almost like news about algebra or, yes, hammers: mature, slow-changing technologies whose changes seldom impact more than a small percentage of users.

So without reasons 1 or 2, the answer to why aren't there C conferences is basic and boring: what important purpose would they serve?

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#223

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

dagw wrote: post #138
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python was popular (though smaller) before NumPy and everything dependent on it came about.

The first version of the project later renamed NumPy was released in 1995, so it's been around almost as long as Python.

Yeah, I started using python around 2.0 and stopped using it because of 3, but from the beginning of my time using it, there always was numeric or numpy

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#224

Post by qznc »

marcosdumay wrote: post #152
DonHopkins wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wanted to attend a "yes" conference. y y y y y .... I heard they were a lot of arguments at the Gnu "cat" conference.

My computer has "true" version 8.26, and I miss some place I can go to discover what's new from version 8.25.

The history of GNU true: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor...

For clarification, you are using coreutils 8.26 which includes true among other things.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#225

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #160
ddevault wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. C should is adding langauge features at a pace other languages could stand to emulate. C is stable, trusted, and supported everywhere for this very reason. Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so.

The problem with not allowing language extensions to be used is that it promotes the staleness of the language. Just as human languages evolve as people use and adjust it, programming languages evolve as people start trying to change it to better suit their needs. The difference with human languages and programming ones is that there's a relatively easy process to get everyone in sync on how it changes for programmin…

This is the fundamental problem with languages that don’t have a good story for user-written compiler extensions: either they don’t adapt to new use cases or the standard gets horribly bloated or else, like Haskell, one implementation becomes the de facto standard.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#226

Post by varjag »

baby wrote: post #209
visualstudio wrote: post #49

I could see it happening in the future. There's has been a mini resurgence in C from (normally high level language) programmers who are getting sick of web development and are interested in data oriented design. Conference benefits could be: Pushing the C standard. C11 is barely supported. Discussing new standards in a forum other than mailing lists. Did you guys know there is already a C17 standard? Letting old C de…

The problem is that nobody new to the scene wants to write C anymore. It's not a secure language, it has no convention and is full of hacks. On top of that it has undefined behaviors and is supported differently by different systems. Nowadays people want to write in Go, Rust, Swift, etc.

Which scene? You still learn C to get work done with hardware, like it on not.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#227

Post by nineteen999 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #219
nineteen999 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chucklefish 2D games or what have you are a far cry (no pun intended) away from a high performance 3D engine like Unreal though. And from what I can find on EA SEED they are mostly using it for server side and pipeline stuff, rather than the primary rendering engines for their 3D games. I'd love to stand corrected if this isn't the case. Don't get me wrong, I'm optimistic, and I'd like to see it happen. Although I wa…

Oh yeah, I don’t mean to imply chucklefish is AAA. I don’t have a ton of info about SEED, pretty much https://twitter.com/gwihlidal/status/1065036212220698624 says > Halcyon itself is still largely C++, but a lot of data pipelines and servers are written with rust, and quite a few rendering experiments, as well. Enough pieces are being developed to build up enough critical mass for 3D, though! and https://twitter.com…

That's great to see even if it's still early days. Thank you also for being a great proponent for the Rust community, your thoughtful and considered answers here have helped convince me to look into Rust more over the longer term, whereas the foam-at-the-mouth types completely send me in the other direction.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#228

Post by theoh »

Alex3917 wrote: post #54

Why isn’t there a bash conference? Someone is missing a golden opportunity to organize Bash Bash.

This is a good example. C made the transition from "hot new platform" to "infrastructural millstone" before conferences on trendy programming topics were a thing.

The original Bourne Shell was written in an odd preprocessed dialect of C called "Bournegol". I'm sure this was analogous to the kind of innovative techniques people present at conferences today.

http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/bournegol.html

Maybe someone else can comment authoritatively on how ideas and techniques were disseminated in the early days if Unix and C. My guess is that it happened through listservs and Usenet, thus reaching even isolated Unix installations who wouldn't have been funded to attend a central conference, if that had been thought of. In Ireland I know that in the 70s there were local meetings of DECUS, for users of Digital Equipment Corp hardware and software. I don't know about Unix.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#229

Post by phoe-krk »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #218
phoe-krk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, all of us execute stuff on kernels that are written in either C or C++ or C# or Objective-C, utilizing runtimes that are written in the same languages and calling APIs that are defined by the C application binary interface. That family of languages isn't going anywhere and choosing C instead of raw assembly is often chosen out of practical reasons, such as code maintainability. Still, I find it hard to put an e…

I said "implemented" in C. I'd argue that the runtime == the implementation.

This doesn't really sound sane to me. In this particular case, it would mean that if you throw away SBCL's compiler, SBCL's standard library, SBCL's extensions, and replace them with something completely different, you still get the same Lisp implementation because all of the aforementioned elements aren't a part of what you call the implementation.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#230

Post by tpush »

haberman wrote: post #176
gnulinux wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a very debatable claim. MSVC is an insignificant compiler in a lot of industries. In something like scientific computing, everything is written with gcc, clang and Intel on mind. Sure, you'll find some companies still using MSVC, but it's not industry standard any more and it's very unclear how an insignificant, outdated compiler can stop the progress of world's most fundamental programming language.

C's strength is being the lingua franca of the bottom of the stack. I can believe that there are some applications that know a priori that they will never need to be portable to MSVC. But for any foundational open-source library, closing the door to MSVC is a high price to pay. Someone, sooner or later, will want to use the code on Windows. If you are zlib, ffmpeg, freetype, Lua, LuaJIT, sqlite, libpng, c-ares, OpenS…

These days you can just use clang on Windows. Latest standard supporting frontend + MSVC ABI compatibility.
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