Some Were Meant for C – The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language (2017) [pdf]

Post by arthurcolle » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 8:45 AM UTC

rootw0rm wrote: post #3

I love C. It's what I learned after learning MASM style Intel assembly. I have a project still at the planning stage. I have many Rust crates lined up. So far I really like the bits of Rust I have learned. C plus generics? Sign me up! But damn, after coming from really awesome IDEs like Visual Studio, it just seems like it's taking me forever to make progress. Right now I'm asking myself, does Rust save me time in th…

Post by bhawks » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 8:52 AM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #50

snickerbockers wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem is not that modern CPUs want to be a PDP-11, it's that they want to be an 8086 for compatibility reasons. From the software's perspective, the ISA *is* the hardware. It doesn't matter if the CPU is internally recompiling everything to a RISC-like architecture with an arbitrary number of registers because there's nothing i can do to access that. If there's ever a radical new ISA which supplants x86 whe…

> From the software's perspective, the ISA is the hardware Precisely! And because the weirdness happens below the ISA, all the mismatches Dave Chisnall describes apply to any other language just as much including actual machine language. So raw machine language is not a low-level language? .

Post by jstimpfle » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #22

waiseristy wrote: post #20

The primary benefit to C is that it is simple. And that is IMO the reason why it has such sticking power. The entire language & toolchain is understandable at a fairly core level without too much effort. Please don’t start a C flame war either HN. I know I’m nerd sniping you all on this one

Write a multithreaded program guaranteed to have no data races in C and tell me that C is simple. C _looks_ simple, deceivingly so. As soon as you need to deal with a large project in a corporate environment on a code base aged in double digit years you don't think it's simple anymore. C is incredibly complex, unmanageably so.

Post by snickerbockers » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #45

snickerbockers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As soon as you need to deal with a large project in a corporate environment on a code base aged in double digit years you don't think it's simple anymore. I've done this before, never felt like C wasn't simple.

How big was the project and how many people were maintaining it? And were the people maintaining it the same people who started it? Perhaps I should have included a statement about coming in to work on a project that was already double digits old when you started working on it.

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Feb 05, 2023, 9:28 AM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #8

slicktux wrote: post #2

Unmanageable really has a context and depending on the use case sometimes C is the best option…

I lol every-time someone quotes their favorite JIT language that is essentially a meta-circular compiler for C library bindings. “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” ( Albert Einstein )