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Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

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Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#61

Post by fn-mote »

mozball wrote: post #50
suprjami wrote: post #8

https://www.learn-c.org/ If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654 If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM Both r/cprogram…

What is your opinion on K&R?

It's great for what it is, but the language and style have come a long way since then. It would be better to learn "Modern C" (this is the title of a book but also at least learn C99 not K&R C).

E.g., people like the book by Jens Gustedt. I'm ambivalent about it, but it sure machine-guns the important points.

[1] https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654/file/ModernC.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#62

Post by liendolucas »

sfpotter wrote: post #54
liendolucas wrote: post #34

Programming in C can turn you into a very disciplined programmer for the simple fact that you will need to track when you request memory and when you need to free it. Essentially you will become the garbage collector. I would recommend you to the read classic "The C Programming Language" (Kernighan & Ritchie) and "Expert C Programming Deep C Secrets" (Van Der Linden) which will get you far enough to write useful prog…

I don't recommend learning how to use Autotools unless you need to work on a project that uses it (and even then, try to avoid it). Highly recommend learning CMake or Meson instead. If you're just getting started, there's no need to tie yourself into knots learning "how to set up a project the right way". It's a waste of time. Your time would initially be better spent just calling the C compiler directly. This will h…

> If you're just getting started, there's no need to tie ...

Yes, this is sane advice! Note that I'm not promoting autotools, I personally suffered it a lot before I got it for my builds, but is a tool that can be reliable across platforms. Yes I would leave the "how to set up a project" for the time when you really need it, no need to spend time on this if you're learning a language.

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#63

Post by andreygrehov »

I'm not a C engineer, but I think I have an interesting recommendation to consider.

Since you are already familiar with other languages, you obviously don't need to know the basics of C. The basics are the same everywhere. Instead, you'd likely want to build that mindset on how to build good software with C.

I suggest you read other people's code and try to deep dive into the whys.

I heard Redis is a well-written software.

    git clone https://github.com/redis/redis.git
    git log –reverse
    git checkout ed9b544e...
We can now see the very first commit made by Salvatore Sanfilippo. From here, we can start exploring. By looking at the commit diffs and git log messages, you'll be able to understand the motivation behind the changes.

When you read a book, the most interesting parts are usually after all the theory is explained at the beginning. Somewhere in the middle of the book they start showing you code samples and that's when things become really interesting.

What I like about the reverse git-log approach is that it immediately throws you into the middle section of the book. This approach is both fun and eye opening.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#64

Post by MonkeyClub »

suprjami wrote: post #8

https://www.learn-c.org/ If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654 If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM Both r/cprogram…

> Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: > https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM

Hard +1 on this!

I think Eskil Steenberg work in C is really top notch - the video is heavily recommended, as is an overview of his work in general, he does some awesome stuff with C.

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#65

Post by flohofwoe »

suprjami wrote: post #8

https://www.learn-c.org/ If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654 If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM Both r/cprogram…

From the learn-c link:

    /* draws a point at 10, 5 */
    struct point p;
    p.x = 10;
    p.y = 5;
    draw(p);
I wish that would be a bit more 'modern', for instance:

    struct point p = {
        .x = 10,
        .y = 5
    };
    draw(p);
...or even:

    draw((struct point){ .x = 10, .y = 5 });
...main reason being that this avoids any accidents with unitialized data if the struct grows (the compound literal initialization makes sure that any struct members that are not mentioned are set to zero, while with the 'old school' approach you might end up with random junk in the struct).

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#66

Post by bogomipz »

mattpallissard wrote: post #25
suprjami wrote: post #8

https://www.learn-c.org/ If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654 If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM Both r/cprogram…

#c on libera is a genuinely helpful place full of neckbeards.

Sorry if this is silly question but what is libera?

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#67

Post by dxbydt »

One thing I always loved about C was how easily you could slip in and out of x86 assembler with the __asm__ tag. There is no ceremony & it seems like magic. Like if you have 3 C int's a,b & c, and you want to add a & b and store the result in c, you would do:

__asm__ ( "addl %%ebx, %%eax;" : "=a" (c) : "a" (a) , "b" (b) );

Then you could just continue in C as if nothing had happened, and a printf("%d",c) would give you the right result. When I worked as a quant, I saw such code snippets quite frequently. Those days (late 90s early 2k), individual programmers had a certain amount of freedom that is completely missing today. You would have a cohesive team with a C programmer, java programmer, a sysadmin, an R guy, a kdb/q quant - no issues. The front end was all java awt widgets, and you would jni to do the hard bits. jni would pull in the C code, which was peppered with little bits of __asm__ to speed things up. Everytime you needed to interact with the outer ecosystem, C would do an fwrite to the file system, then R would pick up the file, do its montecarlo simulations & write back to the filesystem, the algotrading bits would be in q, and even the sysadmin had his share of awk/sed to massage all the back & forth data. It was smooth & nice & pulled 100x its weight. Best of all, the individual programmers had respect for each other's skills & would learn from each other. These days, some asshole CIO would fire the whole bunch & replace them with 10 pythonistas & insist everything should be coded in one true language - and as one of those pythonistas, while I am happy I still have a job in this recession, it is kinda sad, those languages were so much more fun & it was exciting to watch the interplay of different languages bearing their own strengths, whereas python otoh is so terribly boring & everyday is same verbose torch.autograd.Function crap oh well back to the coal mines.

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#68

Post by jerf »

If you're fluent in Rust, you will have no problem learning C considered as a language. If C has any faults it is that it is too simple. Rust even sensitizes you nicely to the worst pokey bits of C, so you won't be wandering blind through the landscape of memory safety like most people learning C. I don't think you'd need books or anything, just grab some tutorials online and start banging away. It's not a hard language.

I say "C considered as a language", because in my opinion and experience the real challenge in learning C is C considered as a platform, that is, learning how to build C projects, how to actually pull in dependencies, how to resolve them when they blow up, how to build cross-platform, understanding the several toolsets used by real projects to accomplish these tasks (raw make, autotools, cmake, etc.), dealing with library conflicts, etc. C is a nice little language, too simple for 2022 and something I wish people would really stop using, but it is at least simple. The C platform is a clusterfuck nightmare disaster zone, if not multiple independent clusterfuck nightmare disaster zones.

I can say with a straight face I "know C", inasmuch as I know the language and have even done some non-trivial work in it. (Not much, but some.) I have never in my career learned C as a platform. This is a choice, and I still think it was even a good choice, but what I'm really highlighting in this post is that this is certainly something that is noticeable, that the fact that I "know C" has actually been of almost no utility whatsoever when I encounter problems and have to fix them because the problems are almost always in the platform. I have made do with a very cobbled-together understanding of the situation and a high degree of "google-fu" on this topic (beyond just "pop the error message in verbatim and hope for the best") and I've chosen not to pursue this any further.

So I would recommend to you that you consider your goals here; do you want to "know C" as a language or a platform? Both are fine options but they lead to different solutions.

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#69

Post by flohofwoe »

mozball wrote: post #50
suprjami wrote: post #8

https://www.learn-c.org/ If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654 If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM Both r/cprogram…

What is your opinion on K&R?

It's much too awkward IMHO, C99 and onward almost feels like a whole new language (mainly because of struct literal and designated init support).

Re: Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?

#70

Post by cillian64 »

galangalalgol wrote: post #37
suprjami wrote: post #8

https://www.learn-c.org/ If you have lots of time: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654 If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: https://matt.sh/howto-c Exercises: https://www.codestepbystep.com/problem/list/c and https://exercism.org/tracks/c Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM Both r/cprogram…

Any recommendations on static analyzers, unit tests, coverage for c? Can clang tidy give hints about modern c they way it does about modern c++?

One useful tool is running clang or gcc with —Werror -Wpedantic which will point out a lot of things which are useful to know about, even if occasionally a false positive.
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