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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

#111

Post by kqr »

saati wrote: post #107
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…

> You wrote code, you knew roughly which instructions it translated to, and there you went! This must have been a very very long time ago, with optimizing compilers you don't really know even if they will emit any instructions.

On x86-type machines, you still have a decent chance, because the instructions themselves are so complicated and high-level. It's not that C is close to the metal, it's that the metal has come up to nearly the level of C!

I wouldn't dare guess what a compiler does to a RISC target.

(But yes, this was back in the early-to-mid 2000s I think. Whether that is a long time ago I don't know.)

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#112

Post by kqr »

enriquto wrote: post #76
brucehoult wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating. Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. And add `-lgc` to linking. It's already there on most systems these days, lots of things use it. You can add some efficiency by `GC_free()` in cases where you're really really sure, but it's entirely optional, and adds a lot of danger. Using `GC_malloc_atomic()` also adds eff…

> Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating. > Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. Even more liberating (and dangerous!): do not even malloc, just use variable length-arrays: void f(float *y, float *x, int n) { float t[n]; // temporary array, destroyed at the end of scope ... } This style forces you to alloc the memory at the outermost scope where it is…

At first I really liked this idea, but then I realised the size of stack frames is quite limited, isn't it? So this would work for small data but perhaps not big data.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#113

Post by ryandrake »

imtringued wrote: post #77
anymouse123456 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is not free of trade offs and you're not helping the cause the way you think you are. Just a few off the top: - Rust is a much more complex language than C - Rust has a much, much slower compiler than pretty much any language out there - Rust takes most people far longer to "feel" productive - Rust applications are sometimes (often?) slower than comparable C applications - Rust applications are sometimes (often?…

That's fair, but to me what drags C and C++ really down for me is the difficulty in building them. As I get older I just want to write the code and not mess with makefiles or CMake. I don't want starting a new project to be a "commitment" that requires me to sit down for two hours. For me Rust isn't really competing against unchecked C. It's competing against Java and boy does the JVM suck outside of server deploymen…

> That's fair, but to me what drags C and C++ really down for me is the difficulty in building them. As I get older I just want to write the code and not mess with makefiles or CMake. I don't want starting a new project to be a "commitment" that requires me to sit down for two hours.

Also, integrating 3rd party code has always been one of the worst parts of writing a C or C++ program. This 3p library uses Autoconf/Automake, that one uses CMake, the other one just ships with a Visual Studio .sln file... I want to integrate them all into my own code base with one build system. That is going to be a few hours or days of sitting there and figuring out which .c and .h files need to be considered, where they are, what build flags and -Ddefines are needed, how the build configuration translates into the right build flags and so on.

On more modern languages, that whole drama is done with pip install or cargo install.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#114

Post by enriquto »

kqr wrote: post #112
enriquto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating. > Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. Even more liberating (and dangerous!): do not even malloc, just use variable length-arrays: void f(float *y, float *x, int n) { float t[n]; // temporary array, destroyed at the end of scope ... } This style forces you to alloc the memory at the outermost scope where it is…

At first I really liked this idea, but then I realised the size of stack frames is quite limited, isn't it? So this would work for small data but perhaps not big data.

In theory, this is a compiler implementation detail. The compiler may chose to put large stacks in the heap, or to not even use a stack/heap system at all. The semantics of the language are independent of that.

In practice, stack sizes used to be quite limited and system-dependent. A modern linux system will give you several megabites of stack by default (128MB in my case, just checked in my linux mint 22 wilma). You can check it using "ulimit -all", and you can change it for your child processes using "ulimit -s SIZE_IN_KB". This is useful for your personal usage, but may pose problems when distributing your program, as you'll need to set the environment where your program runs, which may be difficult or impossible. There's no ergonomical way to do that from inside your C program, that I know of.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#115

Post by wruza »

lqet wrote: post #11

I fully understand that sentiment. For several years now, I have also felt the strong urge to develop something in pure C. My main language is C++, but I have noticed over and over again that I really enjoy using the old C libraries - the interfaces are just so simple and basic, there is no fluff. When I develop methods in pure C, I always enjoy that I can concentrate 100% on algorithmic aspects instead of architectu…

I also like that C forces me to do stuff myself

I never liked that you have to choose between this and C++ though. C could use some automation, but that's C++ in "C with classes" mode. The sad thing is, you can't convince other people to use this mode, so all you have is either raw C interfaces which you have to wrap yourself, or C++ interfaces which require galaxy brain to fully grasp.

I remember growing really tired of "add member - add initializer - add finalizer - sweep and recheck finalizers" loop. Or calculating lifetime orders in your mind. If you ask which single word my mind associates with C, it will be "routine".

C++ would be amazing if its culture wasn't so obsessed with needless complexity. We had a local joke back then: every C++ programmer writes heaps of C++ code to pretend that the final page of code is not C++.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#116

Post by codr7 »

ryandrake wrote: post #110
codr7 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried, but never succeeded in doing that; the complexity eventually seeps in through the cracks. C++'s stdlib contains a lot of convenient features, writing them myself and pretending they aren't there is very difficult. Disabling exceptions is possible, but will come back to bite you the second you want to pull in external code. You also lose some of the flexibility of C, unions become more complicated, struct…

> C++'s stdlib contains a lot of convenient features, writing them myself and pretending they aren't there is very difficult. I've never understood the motivation behind writing something in C++, but avoiding the standard library. Sure, it's possible to do, but to me, they are inseparable. The basic data types and algorithms provided by the standard library are major reasons to choose the language. They are relativel…

The stdlib makes choices that might not be optimal for everyone.

Plenty of code bases also predate it, when I started coding C++ in 1995 most people were still rolling their own.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#117

Post by [deleted] »

johnisgood wrote: post #106
dgacmu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are! But composability is easier in the languages that have generics/templates/etc. There's less passing around of function pointers and writing of custom comparator functions, using something like binary search or sort as an example, and the fact that those comparators can be inlined can often make the rust or C++ version faster than the "as simple to write" C version. Obviously, all of these languages are cap…

When it comes to multithreaded programs, I much prefer Go over C, too. :)

[deleted]

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#119

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Yeah, back in the MS-DOS and Amiga glory days when C compilers were dumb, and anyone writing Assembly by hand could easily outperform them.

C source files for demoscene and games were glorified macro assemblers full of inline assembly.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#120

Post by pjmlp »

graycat wrote: post #61
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 calcul…

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

Money and hardware requirements.

Finally there is a mature open source compiler, and our machines are light years beyond those beefy workstations required for Ada compilers in the 1980's.

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