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Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
131–140 of 978 posts
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#132How and why will C combat Rust?
Rust has a package manager while C and C++ don't (as far as I now). This alone make Rust more attractive for some projects. I hope C and C++ get one.
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#133A more chill question for you - What's your favourite string library?
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#134Are there any plans to "clean up C"? A lot of effort has been put into alternative languages, which are great, but there is still a lot of momentum with C, and it seems that a lot of improvements that could be done in a backwards compatible way and without introducing much in the way of complexity. For example: - Locking down some categories of "undefined behaviour" to be "implementation defined" instead. - Proper ar…
> Proper array support (which passes around the length along with the data pointer).
I second this one. One of the best things from Rust is its "fat pointers", which combine a (pointer, length) or a (pointer, vtable) pair as a single unit. When you pass an array or string slice to a function, under the covers the Rust compiler passes a pair of arguments, but to the programmer they act as if they were a single thing (so there's no risk of mixing up lengths from different slices).
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#135What is your vision of C, its future and its past?
What was it supposed to become and did it become that thing?
What is it now? What will it involve into in the near and far future?
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#136Is there a possibility there will be introduced a new rule saying "if the compiler detects an UB it should abort the compilation instead of breaking the code in the most incomprehensible way possible"? Right now it's just scary to start a new project in C. It would be really great if there was more emphasis on correctness of the produced code instead of the insane optimizations.
This can only be done at compile time in very specific cases. The huge problem here is the compiler has no way of knowing which cases of undefined behavior are bugs in the program and which cases of undefined behavior are just examples of unreachable code. If the compiler aborted compilation when it detected undefined behavior, you’d be getting a lot of false positives for unreachable code, and you’d need to solve that problem (figuring out how to generate sensible errors and suppress them). This is not even remotely easy.
If you are concerned about safety there are ways to achieve that, like using MISRA C, formally verifying your C, or by writing another language like Rust.
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#137I love how small of a language C is and get concerned when people recommend adding feature x,y and z.
What's the plan for C over the next 5 - 10 years?
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#138What has been the rationale or hinderance for not adding locale-independent versions of various stdlib functions? Practically every second C codebase on earth has their own implementations of these at some point, and it remains a huge problem for e.g. writers of libraries, where you don't know how/where your library will be used.
To clarify, do you mean functions like c_isalpha (part of Gnulib) which is like isalpha but only matches 7 bit ASCII characters?
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#139Not a question, a request: Please make __attribute__((cleanup)) or the equivalent feature part of the next C standard. It's used by a lot of current software in Linux, notably systemd and glib2. It solves a major headache with C error handling elegantly. Most compilers already support it internally (since it's required by C++). It has predictable effects, and no impact on performance when not used. It cannot be imple…
Funny you should mention that, as that feature has come up recently in mailing list discussions. We have not seen an actual proposal for adopting it yet, but features similar semantics are being discussed as a possible idea (no promises).
FWIW, I don't think it would wind up being spelled with attribute syntax because we would likely want programmers to have a guarantee that the cleanup will happen (and attributes can be ignored by the implementation).
Re: Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C
#140Hello, I coded in C as a high schooler. Now, 16 years later, I have to code C again semiprofessionally after a very long break.
Big question, how to start programming in C on a high professional level for somebody self schooled in it? Is there a way to cut the corner, without having to go through 10+ years trial and error to gain experience?
Anything for somebody ready to sit, study, and practice for a few hours a day?