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I stopped everything and started writing C again

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Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#61

Post by graycat »

kqr wrote: post #8

I started programming with C a long time ago, and even now, every few months, I dream of going back to those roots. It was so simple. You wrote code, you knew roughly which instructions it translated to, and there you went! Then I try actually going through the motions of writing a production-grade application in C and I realise why I left it behind all those years ago. There's just so much stuff one has to do on one…

When Ada was first announced, I rushed to read about it -- sounded good. But so far, never had access to it.

So, now, after a long time, Ada is starting to catch on???

When Ada was first announced, back then, my favorite language was PL/I, mostly on CP67/CMS, i.e., IBM's first effort at interactive computing with a virtual machine on an IBM 360 instruction set. Wrote a little code to illustrate digital Fourier calculations, digital filtering, and power spectral estimation (statistics from the book by Blackman and Tukey). Showed the work to a Navy guy at the JHU/APL and, thus, got "sole source" on a bid for some such software. Later wrote some more PL/I to have 'compatible' replacements for three of the routines in the IBM SSP (scientific subroutine package) -- converted 2 from O(n^2) to O(n log(n)) and the third got better numerical accuracy from some Ford and Fulkerson work. Then wrote some code for the first fleet scheduling at FedEx -- the BOD had been worried that the scheduling would be too difficult, some equity funding was at stake, and my code satisfied the BOD, opened the funding, and saved FedEx. Later wrote some code that saved a big part of IBM's AI software YES/L1. Gee, liked PL/I!

When I started on the FedEx code, was still at Georgetown (teaching computing in the business school and working in the computer center) and in my appartment. So, called the local IBM office and ordered the PL/I Reference, Program Guide, and Execution Logic manuals. Soon they arrived, for free, via a local IBM sales rep highly curious why someone would want those manuals -- sign of something big?

Now? Microsoft's .NET. On Windows, why not??

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#62

Post by ryukoposting »

hehbot wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Not really. Rustup only ships a limited number of toolchains, with some misses that (for me) are real head-scratchers. i686-unknown-none, for example. Can't get it from rustup. I'm sure there's a way to roll your own toolchain, but Rust's docs might as well tell you to piss up a rope for how much they talk about that.

Why is this important? C is the lingua franca of digital infrastructure. Whether that's due to merit or inertia is left as an exercise for the reader. I sure hope your new project isn't meant to supplant that legacy infrastructure, 'cause if it needs to run on legacy hardware, Rust won't work.

This is an incredibly annoying constraint when you're starting a new project, and Rust won't let you because you can't target the platform you need to target. For example, I spent hours building a Rust async runtime for Zephyr, only to discover it can't run on half the platforms Zephyr supports because Rust doesn't ship support for those platforms.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#63

Post by IshKebab »

guappa wrote: post #15
OutOfHere wrote: post #2

The point is that much of the defensive programming you would have to do in C is unnecessary and automatic in Rust.

There's much more to defensive programming than avoiding double frees and overflows.

Yeah and Rust enables much more defensive programming than just avoiding double frees and overflows.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#64

Post by ycuser2 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #27

Despite what some people religiously think about programming languages, imo C was so successful because it is practical. Yes it is unsafe and you can do absurd things. But it also doesn't get in the way of just doing what you want to do.

I don't think C was successful. It still is! What other language from the 70s is still under the top 5 languages?

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#65

Post by fxtentacle »

hehbot wrote: post #4

[flagged]

completely not!

(And yes, I was considering if I should shout in capslock ;) )

I have seen so many fresh starts in Rust that went great during week 1 and 2 and then they collided with the lifetime annotations and then things very quickly got very messy. Let's store a texture pointer created from an OpenGL context based on in-memory data into a HashMap...

impl GlyphCache {

Yay? And then your hashmap .or_insert_with fails due to lifetime checks so you need a match on the hashmap entry and now you're doing the key search twice and performance is significantly worse than in C.

Or you need to add a library. In C that's #include and a -l linker flag. In Rust, you now need to work through this:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html

to get a valid Cargo.toml. And make sure you don't name it cargo.toml, or stuff will randomly break.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#66

Post by porridgeraisin »

zaphirplane wrote: post #52
bsenftner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 16 years ago I started working with a tech company that used "C++ as C", meaning they used a C++ compiler but wrote pretty much everything in C, with the exception of using classes, but more like Python data classes, with no polymorphism or inheritance, only composition. Their classes were not to hide, but to encapsulate. Over time, some C++ features were allowed, like lambdas, but in general we wrote data clas…

Sounds like they know what they are doing. How is using c++ with only data classes different from using c with struct

Slightly better ergonomics I suppose. Member functions versus function pointers come to mind, as do references vs pointers (so you get to use . instead of ->)

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#67

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Maybe the moral here is learning Lisp made him a better C programmer.

Could he have jumped right into C and had amazing results, if not for the Journey learning Lisp and changing how he thought of programming.

Maybe learning Lisp is how to learn to program. Then other languages become better by virtue of how someone structures the logic.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#68

Post by tcfhgj »

johnisgood wrote: post #40
dgacmu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correctness is not just about security. And the threat environment to which a program may eventually be exposed is not always obvious up front. Also, no: that's only true for some kinds of programs. Rust, c++, and go all have a much easier ecosystem for things like data structures and more complex libraries that make writing many programs much easier than in C. The only place I find C still useful over one of the oth…

> much easier ecosystem for things like data structures and more complex libraries that make writing many programs much easier than in C. So many people have implemented those data structures though, and they are available freely and openly, you can choose to your liking, i.e. ohash, or uthash, or khash, etc. and that is only for a hash table. Those complex libraries are out there, too, for C, obviously. The reason f…

I followed the discussion about Rust in Linux.

One comment talked about not using a (faster) B-Tree instead of a AVL-tree in C, because of the complexity (thus maintenance burden and risk of mistakes) it would add to the code.

They were happy to use a B-Tree in Rust though

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#69

Post by tcfhgj »

__d wrote: post #58
Ygg2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust is a much more complex language than C Feature wise, yes. C forces you to keep a lot of irreducible complexity in your head. > Rust has a much, much slower compiler than pretty much any language out there True. But it doesn't matter much in my opinion. A decent PC should be able to grind any Rust project in few seconds. > Rust applications are sometimes Sometimes is a weasel word. C is sometimes slower than Ja…

> C takes me more time to feel productive. I have to write code, then unit test, then property tests, then run valgrind, check ubsan is on. Make more tests. Do property testing, then fuzz testing. So … make && make check ?

"How to install and use "make" in Windows?"

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32127524/how-to-install-...

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#70

Post by TinkersW »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #42
bamboozled wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a bit like perl but at a lower level ?

You can certainly do entirely absurd things in Perl. But it is a lot easier / safer work with. You get / can get a wealth of information when you the wrong thing in Perl. With C segmentation fault is not always easy to pinpoint. However the tooling for C, with sone if the IDEs out there you can set breakpoints/ walk through the code in a debugger, spot more errors during compile time. There is a debugger included wit…

Eh Segfaults are like the easiest error to debug, they almost always tell you exactly where the problem is.
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