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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

#321

Post by red75prime »

defrost wrote: post #313
red75prime wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just as ballet dancers rarely trip over their own feet walking down a pavement What about about walking down a busy construction site? The most charitable and correct interpretation I can think of is "I'm a professional. Seatbelts and OSHA destroy my productivity."

> What about about walking down a busy construction site? Coordinated people with some years of experience pay attention to the ground and overhead cranes and conveyor belts and survive walking through construction sites, mine sites, aviation hangers, cattle yards, musters, et al on a routine basis. I'm 60+ and have somehow navigated all those environs - including C for critical system control. These are dangerous en…

> After all that, there's always room, in C, in Rust, whatever, to make non basic non obvious mistakes.

Correct, I guess. The number of relatively obvious mistakes should decrease with experience. And it stands to reason that eventually it settles near zero for some part of developer community.

How close to zero and which part of community? Statistic is scarce.

> C has seatbelts and OSHA - valgrind, et al tools abound for sanity checking.

Optional tools with no general enforcement. That is more like elective vaccination or travel advisories. That is, no, no seatbelts and no OSHA.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#322

Post by NoahKAndrews »

mrheosuper wrote: post #304
jpc0 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your current language of choice, both C and C++ have the same problems as what you just described. Regarding ownership transfer it is even worse in C, what if you forget, after moving an object out of a variable, to set that variable to NULL, then free that variable, that's a use after free. At least in C++ you have move semantics although it is still error prone. In rust it's a compiler error. Copy and Clone…

Well, i dont use C++ much(i'm FW engineer, most of my stuff is in C). The std in C is simple and explicit. For Ex: I can make an educated guess how memcpy() work by looking at its signature. It takes pointer to src and destination, and size, so i can guess it does not allocate any new memory(or if it has, it has to be some kind of optimization reason). Another example is strstr(), it returns pointer to a piece of mem…

Isn't guessing what a function does based purely on its name pretty risky? There's usually nuance, so if I'm not already familiar with a function, I'm looking up its docs at least once.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#323

Post by clownpenis_fart »

WalterBright wrote: post #199
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…

> Memory leaks, NULL pointer dereferences, use-after-free I suffered writing those for many years. I finally simply learned not to do them anymore. Sort of like there's a grain of sand on the bottom of my foot and the skin just sort of entombed it in a callous.

[dead]

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#324

Post by tialaramex »

kelnos wrote: post #223
ohgr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d add that the Rust code and C code will probably have the same number of bugs. The C code will likely have some vulnerabilities on top of those. Rust doesn’t magically make the vast majority of bugs go away. Most of bugs are entirely portable!

Vulnerabilities are bugs, so the C code will have more bugs than the Rust program. You might say that the C and Rust code will have the same number of logic errors , but I'm not convinced that's the case either. Sure, if you just directly translate the C to Rust, maybe. But if you rewrite the C program in Rust while making good use of Rust's type system, it's likely you'll have fewer logic errors in the Rust code as…

> most Result-returning functions in the stdlib being marked #[must_use]

Actually it's a bit cleverer than that, and some people might benefit from knowing this. The Result type itself is marked #[must_use]. If you're writing a Goat library and you are confident that just discarding a Goat is almost always a mistake regardless of the context in which they got a Goat you too should mark your Goat type #[must_use = "this `Goat` should be handled properly according to the Holy Laws of the Amazing Goat God"] and now everybody is required to do that or explicitly opt out even for their own Goat code.

Obviously don't do this for types which you can imagine reasonable people might actually discard, only the ones where every discard is a weird special case.

Types I like in Rust which help you avoid writing errors the compiler itself couldn't possibly catch:

Duration - wait are these timeouts in seconds or milliseconds? It's different on Windows? What does zero mean, forever or instant ?

std::cmp::Ordering - this Doodad is Less than the other one

OwnedFd - it's "just" a file descriptor, in C this would be an integer, except, this is always a file descriptor, it can't be "oops, we didn't open a file" or the count of lines, or anything else, we can't Add these together because that's nonsense, they're not really integers at all.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#325

Post by Klonoar »

BigJono wrote: post #240
kelnos wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen you make these kinds of comments before on other articles. Please stop. Not everyone is perfect and can forevermore avoid making any mistakes. I strongly suspect your opinion of your skill here is overinflated. Even if it isn't, and you really are that good, everyone cannot be in the top 0.00001% of all programmers out there, so your suggestion to "simply" learn not to make mistakes is useless. This all jus…

You come off as incredibly arrogant too, you just don't realise it because you have the current mainstream opinion and the safety of a crowd. Do you know how fucking obnoxious it is when 200 people like you come into every thread to tell 10 C or Javascript developers that they can't be trusted with the languages and environments they've been using for decades? There are MILLIONS of successful projects across those tw…

Nobody is telling JS developers that Rust will save them, chill.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#326

Post by koe123 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #272
naasking wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I don’t know which good parts of C++ they kept. comptime is a better version of C++ templates.

I really wish that were true but it isn’t. Modern C++ templates/constexpr are much more powerful and expressive than any Zig comptime equivalent. The power and expressiveness of the C++ compile-time capabilities are the one thing I strongly miss when using other languages. The amount of safety and conciseness those features enable makes not having them feel like a giant step backward. Honestly, if another systems lan…

I have written a lot of Zig comptime code and ended up finding the opposite. In C++ I find I have to bend over backward to get what I want done, often resulting in insane compile times. I've used metaprogramming libraries like Boost Hana before to have some more ergonomics, but even that I would consider inferior to comptime.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to have any examples of what you describe, where C++ is more powerful and expressive than Zig?

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#327

Post by bsenftner »

hliyan wrote: post #278
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…

Funnily enough, 16 years ago, I too was in exactly this type of company. C++, using classes, inheritance only for receiving callbacks, most attributes were public (developers were supposed to know how not to piss outside the bowl), pthreads with mutexed in-memory queues for concurrency, no design patterns (yes we used globals instead of Singleton) etc. So blazingly fast we were measuring latencies in sub 100-microsec…

Yes, very similar. We had pthreaded mutexed queues too, and measured timings with clock_gettime() with CLOCK_MONOTONIC. Our facial template match runs at 25M compares per second per core, and simply keeping that pipeline fed required all kinds of timing synchronizations.

The only community I know that produces developers that know this kind of stuff intimately are console game programmers, and then only the people responsible for maintaining the FPS at 60. I expect the embedded community knows this too, but is too small for me to know many of them to get a sense of their general technical depth.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#328

Post by wolvesechoes »

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…

Not everything can be proved at compile-time, so necessarily Rust is going to complain about things that you know can be done safely in that specific context.

For example some tree structures are famously PITA in Rust. Yes, possible, but PITA nonetheless.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#329

Post by daitangio »

Java was created to solve some frequent troubles you have in C-code.

I do not want to be rude, but C has some error-prone syntax: if you forget a *, you will be in trouble. If you do 1 byte offset error on an array in the stack, you get erratic behavior, core dump if you are lucky.

Buffer overlflows also poses security risks.

try...catch was not present on C, and it is one of the most powerful addition of C++ for code structuring.

Thread management/async programming without support from the language (which is fine, but if you see Erlang or Java, they have far more support for thread monitors).

Said that, there are very high quality library in C (pthreads, memory management and protection, lib-eventio etc) which can overcome most of its limit but... it is still error-prone

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#330

Post by edye »

moron4hire wrote: post #259

About a year ago, I had gotten fed up with what felt like overlyb strict context requirements basically giving me to abandon years of work and thought I'd try my hand at C++ again. I wanted to do this on Linux, because I my main laptop is a Linux machine after my children confiscated my Windows laptop to play Minecraft with the only decent GPU in the house. And I just couldn't get past the tooling. I could not get th…

I find make, cmake, and the other stuff annoying also. For personal stuff I just use a build.sh file. For debugging I use gf2, which is a gdb frontend. Hopefully raddebugger gets ported to linux soon. One nice tool I like on linux for prototyping is the tiny c compiler, because it compiles 7x faster than gcc or clang. It is also much faster than the visual studio compiler. I remember trying to get the tiny c compiler to work on windows; it can compile things, but I couldn't get it to generate pdb files for debug info.
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