581–590 of 978 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Several of us discussed typeof and I'd expect a proposal for a feature along these lines to be well received. (I recall someone even saying they're working on one but that shouldn't stop anyone from submitting one of their own.)
I'm glad to hear that. What about statement expressions? They're quite useful, and supported by multiple independent compilers.
1. How likely are named constants of any types to be included in C2x? I'm referring to the idea of making register const values be usable in constant expressions. 2. Is there, or was there ever a proposal to make struct types without a tag be structurally typed? This would not break backwards compatibility as far as I can see, and would make these types much more useful as ad-hoc bags of data. Small example: struct {…
(The committee is fine with incremental improvements, but new syntax need to have strong motivation behind it, much stronger than this.)
A lot of you seem to be working on commercial solutions to C's insecurity. Does this feel like a conflict of interest to you?
Good question, but not at all! I've been working as hard as I can for the past 15 years to improve C Language security as have other security-minded members of the committee. Generally speaking, we are in the minority as performance is still the major driver for the language. Any security solution that introduces > 5% overhead, for example, is a nonstarter. I think we all understand that are jobs are completely safe…
Would you consider adding a built-in way to safely multiply two numbers? Numeric overflows in things like calculation of buffer sizes can lead to vulnerabilities. Signed overflow is UB, and due to integer promotion signs creep in unexpected places. It's not trivial to check if overflow happened due to UB rules. A naive check can make things even worse by "proving" the opposite to the optimizer. And all of that is to…
Several places in support functions, I have coded unusually to avoid wrap-around etc. I bet you could devise something like that for (unsigned) multiplication.
When you're looking at an unfamiliar C code base for the first time, how do you approach it? Which files do you look for? Which tools to you open up immediately?
cscope can help
Curious what the committee members think of the new competitors to C, e.g. Go, Rust, and Zig. Any comments?
go isnt a competitor to c
https://www.f-secure.com/en/consulting/foundry/usb-armory
As does Google,
https://github.com/google/gvisor
https://github.com/google/gapid
Naturally if one is talking about specific uses cases like IoT with a couple of KBs, MISRA-C, or UNIX kernels, then yes Go is not a competitor.
To what extent does compiler complexity factor into your thinking about the evolution of C? Thanks for this!
When the committee considers proposals, we do consider the implementation burden of the proposal as part of the feature. If parts of the proposal would be an undue burden for an implementation, the committee may request modifications to the proposal, or justification as to why the burden is necessary.
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html
I.e. offering a way that arrays won't automatically decay to pointers when passed as a function parameter.