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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

#161

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

Modern C++ has goodies like consteval that are supremely useful for embedded work. STL and the rest of the stdlib on the other hand depends on heap and exceptions for error reporting which are generally a no go zone for resource constrained targets.

You can productively use C++ as C-with-classes (and templates, and namespaces, etc.) without depending on the library. That leaves you no worse off than rolling your own support code in plain C.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#162

Post by jcranmer »

kelnos wrote: post #135
checker659 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, modern CPUs have essentially been designed to make C code run as fast as possible.

Definitely not true. One look at what a modern C compiler does to optimize the code you give it will disabuse you of that notion. There's nothing special or magic about C code, and, if anything, C has moved further and further away from its "portable assembler" moniker over time. And compilers can emit very similar machine instructions for the same type of algorithm regardless of whether you're writing C, Rust, Go, Z…

It sort of is and isn't true. CPUs are designed to make certain programming models work very well, and they've done so at the costs of making other kinds of programming paradigms work well (as compared to, say, a GPU, which wants a programming model for which C and C-like languages are clearly ill-fitting). So it's not a wrong statement if you think of it as "designed for C-like languages."

But if you're using it in the sense of "C is a privileged language in terms of its connection to hardware architecture, " well, C isn't, and that statement is patently false. There's not a major difference between C, C++, Rust, Zig--even going as far afield as bytecode languages like Java and C#, or fully interpreted stuff like Python or Perl, especially as far as computer architects are concerned.

(And in the sense of "this is the language that architects care most about for tuning performance," I think that's actually C++, simply because that tends to be the language for the proprietary HPC software that pays the big bucks for compiler support.)

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#163

Post by MaulingMonkey »

ryukoposting wrote: post #62
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…

> toolchains

Are what cargo, rustc, etc. are expected to run on. You probably meant target.

> i686-unknown-none

Is admittedly a missing target. `x86_64-unknown-none` specifies stuff like `extern "C"`'s ABI (per https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/x86_64-unkn... ) which is a lot less universal/appropriate for i686, where AFAIK everyone chooses their own different incompatible ABIs - which might be the reason it's not provided? Usually you want to pick an i686-unknown-* target that aligns more closely with your own needs (e.g. your desired object/library/binary file format, abi, bootloader, ...?)

    C:\local>rustup target list | findstr i686
    i686-linux-android
    i686-pc-windows-gnu
    i686-pc-windows-gnullvm
    i686-pc-windows-msvc (installed)
    i686-unknown-freebsd
    i686-unknown-linux-gnu
    i686-unknown-linux-musl
    i686-unknown-uefi
If, truly, none of them are appropriate for your needs, that's when it's time to use a custom target (per https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/targets/custom.html ) and `build-std` (per https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/unstable.html#buil... .) Using a toolchain file to pin your nightly rustc version might be appropriate (per https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/overrides.html#the-toolch... .)

The last time I played with custom targets was on https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/rust-opendingux-test/tree/m... , using the old `xargo` instead of `build-std`. Notes.md details modifications made to make things work.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#164

Post by uecker »

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…

C compilers got a lot better though and sanitizers and analyzers can also easily catch a lot of mistakes.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#165

Post by Sysreq2 »

kelnos wrote: post #127

I'm kinda in the opposite camp. After doing a bunch of VB in my tweens and teens, I learned Java, C, and C++ in college, settling on mostly C for personal and professional projects. I became a core developer of Xfce and worked on that for 5 years. Then I moved into backend development, where I was doing all Java, Scala, and Python. It was... dare I say... easy! Sure, these kinds of languages bring with them other pro…

I will say the more recent additions to C++ at least have solved many of my long standing issues with that C-variant. Most of it was stuff that was long overdue. Like string formatting or a thread safe println. But even some of the stuff I didn’t think I would love has been amazing. Modules. Modules bro. Game changer. I’m all in. Honestly C++ is my go to for anything that isn’t just throw away again. Python will always be king of the single use scripts.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#166

Post by baq »

phicoh wrote: post #140
jancsika wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! Related-- I'm curious what percentage of Rust newbies "fighting the borrow checker" is due to the compiler being insufficiently sophisticated vs. the newbie not realizing they're trying to get R…

If you come from C to Rust to basically have to rewire your brain. There are some corner cases that are wrong in Rust, but mostly you have to get used to a completely new way of thinking about object lifetimes and references to objects.

...and then you come back to your C code and think 'how could I not think of these things'.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#168

Post by MaulingMonkey »

jancsika wrote: post #129
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…

> 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! Related-- I'm curious what percentage of Rust newbies "fighting the borrow checker" is due to the compiler being insufficiently sophisticated vs. the newbie not realizing they're trying to get R…

I certainly spent most (95%+?) of my "fighting the borrow checker" time writing code I would never try to write in C++. A simple example is strings: I'd spend a lot of time trying to get a &str to work instead of a String::clone, where in equivalent C++ code I'd never use std::string_view over std::string - not because it would be a memory error to do so in my code as it stood, but because it'd be nearly impossible to keep it memory safe with code reviews and C++'s limited static analysis tooling.

This was made all the worse by the fact that I frequently, eventually, succeeded in "winning". I would write unnecessary and unprofiled "micro-optimizations" that I was confident were safe and would remain safe in Rust, that I'd never dare try to maintain in C++.

Eventually I mellowed out and started .clone()ing when I would deep copy in C++. Thus ended my fight with the borrow checker.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#169

Post by klysm »

Sysreq2 wrote: post #165
kelnos wrote: post #127

I'm kinda in the opposite camp. After doing a bunch of VB in my tweens and teens, I learned Java, C, and C++ in college, settling on mostly C for personal and professional projects. I became a core developer of Xfce and worked on that for 5 years. Then I moved into backend development, where I was doing all Java, Scala, and Python. It was... dare I say... easy! Sure, these kinds of languages bring with them other pro…

I will say the more recent additions to C++ at least have solved many of my long standing issues with that C-variant. Most of it was stuff that was long overdue. Like string formatting or a thread safe println. But even some of the stuff I didn’t think I would love has been amazing. Modules. Modules bro. Game changer. I’m all in. Honestly C++ is my go to for anything that isn’t just throw away again. Python will alwa…

The problem is that they are _additions_, C++ has such absurd sprawl. The interactions between everything in this massive sprawl is quite difficult to grasp

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#170

Post by Yie1cho »

henning wrote: post #134

> Defensive programming all the way : all bugs are reduced to zero right from the start Has it been fuzzed? Have you had someone who is very good at finding bugs in C code look at it carefully? It is understandable if the answer to one or both is "no". But we should be careful about the claims we make about code.

he may be good at C but not that good. no one's that good. and this stupid overconfidence leads to sec holes.
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