221–230 of 536 posts
My career is in full stack web development but I program in C in my master's degree coursework and as a hobby. Every time I have to peel back a decade's worth of CSS to move a button on a webapp I daydream of moving to a career in C. Is the grass actually greener on the other side?
People who still write C, honest question: Why? C is full of quirks. From cryptic "undefined behaviors" to a type system that isn't really a type system (more like "size hints for the compiler"), the language doesn't feel easy to use/debug. Add to this CPP macros, a universally recognized bad idea, a clunky import system, and lack of a single reference implementation of the compiler/libC, and you have a language that…
1. It gives me a lot of control over how the program works, which lets me create programs that work faster and use less memory than would be possible in most other languages. 2. Relatedly, it's more explicit than almost any other language. If a line of code doesn't look like a function call, it's not calling anything. There is no hidden control flow. These statements are not true in languages which support operator o…
Why only Zig?
My career is in full stack web development but I program in C in my master's degree coursework and as a hobby. Every time I have to peel back a decade's worth of CSS to move a button on a webapp I daydream of moving to a career in C. Is the grass actually greener on the other side?
That's very fun, very demanding, very well paid (when you have experience and know what you are doing) (as much as you can with C)
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The control flow is the same; you evaluate the parameters, and then evaluate the operator. Just like any other function call, there's nothing implicit or hidden. The only difference is that you can't create other operators with the same name for different types. And whether something is called or run inline is always decided by the compiler. Modern C doesn't promise you any relation between the way you break down you…
If I see `x+y` in C, I know 100% that it'll be ~0-1 instructions, O(1), and will have the lowest latency & highest throughput that a thing can have, i.e. basically completely ignorable for figuring out the perf of a piece of code, or determining what complex things it may do (additionally, it'll hint that the operands are pointers or numbers). For `f(x,y)`, none of those may hold. With operator overloading, f(x,y) an…
People who still write C, honest question: Why? C is full of quirks. From cryptic "undefined behaviors" to a type system that isn't really a type system (more like "size hints for the compiler"), the language doesn't feel easy to use/debug. Add to this CPP macros, a universally recognized bad idea, a clunky import system, and lack of a single reference implementation of the compiler/libC, and you have a language that…
C’s type system is lacking, I wish it was more strict, and sometimes I wish it had some features from C++ (operator overloading for mathematical types, templates for generic programming) and features of other languages (multiple return values especially), but overall I’m okay with its limitations and have become used to working around them. Sometimes I compile C code with a C++ compiler just to take advantage of stricter typing, templates, etc. but for a lot of projects this isn’t a necessity.
People who still write C, honest question: Why? C is full of quirks. From cryptic "undefined behaviors" to a type system that isn't really a type system (more like "size hints for the compiler"), the language doesn't feel easy to use/debug. Add to this CPP macros, a universally recognized bad idea, a clunky import system, and lack of a single reference implementation of the compiler/libC, and you have a language that…
C code written today will still be runnable 30+ years from now, and likely on whatever platform you're using, unlike code written in some flavor of the month language. C is standardized, has been ported to every architecture, and is easy to port in general, and there's so much code that's already been written in it that the inertia behind it is virtually insurmountable. I've invested significant time in other language ecosystems (like Perl, coincidentally also on the front page) only to see them eventually declared "uncool" (however productive) and killed-off by faddish HN types. But I'm confident they won't have similar success against C.
C is the real Hundred Year Language: http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
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I don't write C as much as i used to but i still write a lot of it, including new code. The reasons are: 1. C is relatively simple. Sure, not as simple as it could be (e.g. compared to something like Oberon-07) but in the grand scheme of language things, it is far on the simpler side of the spectrum. I can write a C parser relatively easy if i want to for example (and at some point years ago i did that to transpile a…
> let me store some state or have a loop This is arguably already possible, and was possible even before c99 added variadic macros. Although the code is a bit cumbersome to write.
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I believe that with the arrival of ChatGPT and similar tools, writing code in C will become as easy as in any other language. The AI tools know how to generate good C code, and C is fast by itself. I believe we'll see a lot more code written in C now that we have new tools to analyze C code.
I have grown somewhat tired of these ChatGPT responses. It's a tool...not a panacea. C is a fantastic, albeit somewhat complicated, language. The problem is a C programmer knows the quirks and ChatGPT will dump you some code that could have undefined behavior depending on the compiler. Will ChatGPT always use restrict correctly (for example)?
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> These statements are not true in languages which support operator overloading I guess I will never understand the C and Java developers incredible fear of operator overloading. Do you have the same reaction to user-defined functions? Because they are exactly the same thing. Is it because of the bad type system that won't let you know what operator you are using?
I guess I will never understand the C and Java developers incredible fear of operator overloading. The answer is in the sentences right before the one you quoted: Relatedly, it's more explicit than almost any other language. If a line of code doesn't look like a function call, it's not calling anything. There is no hidden control flow. Consider the use-cases for C: operating system kernels, hard real-time software, l…