Why Aren't There C Conferences?

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:31 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #76

haberman wrote: post #72

C 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.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:33 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #213

badpun wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a waste of your employer’s time. For you they’re great, you’re still getting paid, but don’t have to work.

> They are a waste of your employer’s time... Yet it is employers who [often] pay for employees to go to these things? Hmmm, why do you think that is?

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:36 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #226

baby wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:36 PM UTC

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…

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:39 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #92

phoe-krk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CLOC tells me there's 28391 lines of C and 426525 lines of Lisp in there. Also remember that Lisp has, on average, higher code density than C thanks to advanced macro usage. Pointing to C code in that repository and saying SBCL is implemented in C is like pointing to https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/binary-distribution... and saying that SBCL is implemented in Bash.

The runtime is written in C. That's the important bit. Just because the compiler, standard library, etc, isn't - doesn't mean it's not based on C. You cannot use SBCL without a C compiler.