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To become a good C programmer (2011)

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#91

Post by markus_zhang »

aungmyohtet wrote: post #87

>> Expert C Programming . This book is fantastic because it will bring your attention to what happens under the hood in a very entertaining way. I am not a C programmer nor was trying to become one. Just trying to be familiar with low level programming and computer internals in general. But I enjoyed reading the book a lot. One of the the stories I remember is about the programming contest at Carnegie-Mellon Universi…

This reminds me of Mel the real programmer. I'll quote:

Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the “read head” and available for immediate execution. There was a program to do that job, an “optimizing assembler”, but Mel refused to use it.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#92

Post by fabiensanglard »

polyphonicist wrote: post #85
fabiensanglard wrote: post #13

I feel like I wrote that a decade ago. Wait. Damn. It WAS a decade ago. Amazingly the list is still relevant. I will try to check out the new suggestions on this thread.

Has your book recommendations changed in this decade? Would you recommend different books today?

No, I think these books are still a decent recipe for a good start.

There are a few mentioned on this thread I have not read yet so maybe these will change my mind.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#93

Post by yters »

markus_zhang wrote: post #86

I think for us laymen, the most difficult thing is to find a good reason to use C frequently. I have a few "legitimate" (in the sense that C is actually suitable for those) non-embedded projects that I'd like to take on in the future when I have time to pick up C: 1 - Recreate some of the Linux command line tools, including a command line interface similar to BASH; 2 - Implement a fully functional compiler or byte-co…

C + knowing the Linux API and what is done in kernel vs user space can lead to very efficient Linux software. Since much consumer software these days is a webapp with a Linux backend, this sort of embedded optimization can make good consumer sense.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#94

Post by UK-Al05 »

fortran77 wrote: post #90
wwweston wrote: post #28

One of the things I tend to think about these days is return on investment. I spent several years at the beginning of my career being a bad and then mediocre C programmer, and once I found a few other languages, I got the sense that being a mediocre-to-good programmer in these languages would be much easier, and that seems to have been borne out. Late into a career investing in other areas, what's the advantage of be…

Oh come on now. I will develop in "safe" languages where possible (my favorites are F# and Erlang), but when I need to do something on the hardware, I still use C (and C++). Rust and Go are not viable options for everything, especially when you need complete control. Why does the Rust community have to make every discussion about Rust?

What can c do that rust can't?

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#95

Post by sedachv »

jason0597 wrote: post #31
wwweston wrote: post #28

One of the things I tend to think about these days is return on investment. I spent several years at the beginning of my career being a bad and then mediocre C programmer, and once I found a few other languages, I got the sense that being a mediocre-to-good programmer in these languages would be much easier, and that seems to have been borne out. Late into a career investing in other areas, what's the advantage of be…

Rust isn't viable for embedded platforms, at least not yet. It's not as easy to compile it to the most obscure ISAs as C, and the little support it has for stuff like STM32 is restricted to just that group of microcontrollers and doesn't support the entire ARM range. Maybe in the future? I'm looking forward to that day! Go is probably never going to run on microcontrollers due to its very big overhead. C perfectly ma…

> Every single design decision about C was made with the computer in mind.

A computer. The PDP-11. C was a terrible fit for a lot of the popular contemporary architectures when it was designed (PDP-10, Burroughs large systems, UNIVAC 1100, CDC mainframes, HP 3000), and continued to be a very poor fit for many computers in the 1980s (segmented 8086 and 286, 6502, AS/400, Lisp Machines except for Xerox, Connection Machine, Tandem, Novix/RTX, Transputer, etc.).

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#96

Post by exikyut »

quelsolaar wrote: post #51
pmiller2 wrote: post #15

Interesting comment they made about using C89 for portability. What's the state of C99 today? I know gcc doesn't support all C99 features, but what about other compilers? Is it worthwhile to use C99 in a new project?

C99 is well supported now, but Its has become increasingly clear that some of the changes to the definition of undefined behavior in the spec has made som very troubling compiler optimizations possible that can make C a lot less dependable. Later versions of C also adopt a new memory model that is very broken. memcopy is for instance impossible to implement in C17. Due to these issues the Linux kernel is no longer us…

Where can I read more about this?

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#98

Post by naasking »

nomel wrote: post #61
zenhack wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single design decision about C was made with the computer in mind. The only problem is that computers have changed a bit in the last 50 years, and C largely hasn't. There are a couple issues: First, C was designed for single-pass compilers, because the PDP-7 it was designed for was too small to actually run much fancier of a compiler. So C is seriously sub-optimal for optimization in a lot of ways (because th…

> CPU performance has completely outstripped memory perf, so memory hierarchies and locality are everything > they don't show up in the language at all... requires knowing things that the code wouldn't suggest at all I'm utterly confused at this. It's trivial to layout memory as you please, where you please, very directly, in C. Set a pointer to and address and write to it. Better yet, I can define a packed struct th…

> It's trivial to layout memory as you please, where you please, very directly, in C

It wasn't trivial before fixed width integral types, which is fairly recent in C terms (C99), and it's still far more complicated than it needs to be.

Furthermore, the fact that C is the defacto language of performance means that our hardware has been constrained by needing to run C programs well in order to compete.

Think of all the interesting innovation we could have had without such constraints. For instance, see how powerful and versatile GPUs have become because they didn't carry that legacy.

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#99

Post by ExtremisAndy »

wmwragg wrote: post #67
fabiensanglard wrote: post #13

I feel like I wrote that a decade ago. Wait. Damn. It WAS a decade ago. Amazingly the list is still relevant. I will try to check out the new suggestions on this thread.

I've found "Understanding and Using C Pointers" by Richard Reese, a really wonderful book.

So glad to see this little gem mentioned! I have many books on C, but this is the only one I've ever read cover-to-cover. Clear and to the point, and no fluff/silliness. One of my favorite programming books ever!

Re: To become a good C programmer (2011)

#100

Post by polyphonicist »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #47
imron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But today, there is little reason for most projects not use the advances found in C99. Does visual studio support c99 yet? Last I heard MS wasn’t interested in supporting it.

It supports most of it. Useless stuff like VLA is still uninmplemented though.

Why is VLA useless?

Why was it added to C99?

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