Taking C Seriously

Post by LukeShu » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 2:07 AM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #2

>C was developed between 1969 and 1973, making it nearly 40 years old [...] C ha[s] already made an exceptionally good start on a century-long reign In all fairness, development continued past 1973. Most C programmers today would have some trouble even reading the code from the 1978 first edition of K&R; and the void* pointer, that the author refers to later in the article, was a part of ANSI C (~1990).

Post by cageface » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 2:48 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #17

Pure C seems to be enjoying a bit of language fad hipness lately but I don't know anybody that has to maintain a large body of non-trivial, low-level code that chooses pure C over C++. There's a good reason that everything from Solaris to V8 to Photoshop to Quake is written in C++ and not C. That C is still in wide use after 40 years is a testament to the elegance of its original design but let's not get carried away…

Post by derleth » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 3:24 AM UTC

qdog wrote: post #14

derleth wrote: post #4

The problem is, nothing in this article even begins to address the actual criticism people have of C, instead saying that it's possible to write good C code and that Java is a memory hog. The first is true, the second is debatable, both as to whether it's the case and whether it matters. For example, read this: http://www.jwz.org/doc/gc.html > In a large application, a good garbage collector is more efficient than ma…

JWZ also states "Java and Emacs are really bad examples of GC-oriented environments." in that same article. And later, in 2000, he states "Today, I program in C." http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html JWZ is an entertaining read, but unless he's updated in a post somewhere in the last 11 years, it isn't clear to me where he comes down on C at the moment. Btw, I program in C.

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 4:21 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #32

pshc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article is just praise of the minimalist C style I guess. To elaborate, the actual problem with C is that you have to deal with ownership semantics manually. In languages with things like uniqueness typing or automatic reference counting that problem goes away. Common to all these languages and all GCed languages is the need for memory management--clearing references or maps or just generally indicating (wi…

Every time I think about writing anything substantial in C I think about manual memory management and error handling via error codes and I quickly shelve the idea.

Post by drfugly » Thu, Nov 03, 2011, 4:50 AM UTC

mbq wrote: post #15

derleth wrote: post #4

The problem is, nothing in this article even begins to address the actual criticism people have of C, instead saying that it's possible to write good C code and that Java is a memory hog. The first is true, the second is debatable, both as to whether it's the case and whether it matters. For example, read this: http://www.jwz.org/doc/gc.html > In a large application, a good garbage collector is more efficient than ma…

Zawinski's point is true iff "large application" means an application which allocates and frees plethora of tiny chunks -- however I will argue that this is not a necessity, rather a style coming from a try to port scripting experience to lower-level languages to speed up development. Probably in most cases this is not a problem (no one will notice 100us speedup in GUI), but if one starts to tweak GC or new to rescue…