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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

#381

Post by pjmlp »

postexitus wrote: post #369
pjmlp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the reference to Amiga. Every random reference to my beloved computer fills me with joy.

On my circle of friends I was the PC guy, however got to enjoy quite a bit of the Amiga ecosystem, thanks to us being always being around each others, and some incursions into our demoscene attempts.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#382

Post by int_19h »

otterley wrote: post #288
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…

I think a more charitable interpretation of what he said was, "after sufficient practice, I became good enough to start avoiding those pitfalls." It's not all that different from learning any challenging task. I can't skateboard to save my life, but the fact that people can do it well is both admirable and the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. Skilled people can sometimes forget how long it took t…

And, given who OP is, "sufficient practice" here translates to "has been writing compilers in C++ for 4 decades".

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#383

Post by WalterBright »

red75prime wrote: post #321
defrost wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aboun…

> The number of relatively obvious mistakes should decrease with experience

Yes, and the kind of mistakes I make have changed. Now they are usually a failure to understand the problem correctly, or are simply typos.

> Optional tools with no general enforcement

That's right. The tools don't work unless you use them. With D the idea is to build the tool into the language itself. I once annoyed the Coverity folks by saying D's purpose is to put Coverity out of business.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#384

Post by int_19h »

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

Templates (without crazy metaprogramming stuff) can be a godsend for basic data structures.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#385

Post by int_19h »

enriquto wrote: post #220
dzdt wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a giant peeve of mine that automatic memory management, in the C language sense of the resource being freed at the end of its lexical scope, is tied to the allocation being on the machine stack which in practice may have incredibly limited size. Gar! Why!?

Ackshually, it has nothing to do with the C language. It's an implementation choice by some compilers. A conforming implementation could give you the whole RAM and swap to your stack.

Yes, but does any implementation actually do that?

AFAIK Ada is typically more flexible, but that has to do with the language actually giving you enough facilities to avoid heap allocations in more cases - e.g. you can not only pass VLAs into a function in Ada, but also return one from a function. So it becomes idiomatic, and compilers then have to support this (usually by maintaining a second "large" stack).

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#386

Post by WalterBright »

defrost wrote: post #246
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…

He's not making a comment about everyone , it's a specific comment about how often long time C programmers make basic mistakes after a million SLOC or so. In this instance Walter is correct - the mistakes he listed are very rarely made by experienced C programmers, just as ballet dancers rarely trip over their own feet walking down a pavement. The problem of those errors being commonplace in those that are barely fiv…

> ballet dancers

So true. I know dancers who have been at it for decades. They "make it look easy", and it is easy for them. But try to do it yourself, and you look like a moose.

A friend of mine trains dancers for a living. He says the most effective teaching tool is the video camera. But he doesn't bring it out until his student is "hooked" on dancing, because prematurely showing them the video of them dancing just crushes them.

P.S. You can tell a ballet dancer just by the way they walk down the street. I once was at the airport and saw a lady unloading her bags. I just said Hi, you must be a ballet dancer! She replied nope, I'm an ice dancer, off to a competition. LOL.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#387

Post by int_19h »

brucehoult wrote: post #305
kqr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those would be the difficult questions one would be forced to confront ahead of time with this technique. That's not a bug; it's a feature! Similar to what Ada does with access types which are lexically scoped.

The problem is that regardless of the amount of confrontation it does not have an answer for any infinite run time event-loop based program, other than "allocate all of memory into a buffer at startup and implement your own memory manager inside that". Which just punts the problem from a mature and tested runtime library to some code you just make up on the spot.

Heap was invented for a reason, and some tasks are naturally easier to model with it.

The problem is that once it's there, people start using it as the proverbial hammer, and everything looks like a nail even if it isn't.

Note though that ""allocate all of memory into a buffer at startup" is a lot more viable if you scope it not to the start of the app, but to the entrypoint of some code that needs to make a complicated calculation. It's actually not all that uncommon to need something heap-like to store temporary data as you compute - e.g. a list or map to cache intermediary results - but which shouldn't outlive the computation. Ada access types give you exactly that - declare them inside the top-level function that's your entrypoint, allocate as needed in nested functions as they get called, and know that it'll all be cleaned up once the top-level function returns.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#388

Post by int_19h »

seanw444 wrote: post #362
pansa2 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C, Go, Python, and Lua are my go-to languages because of their simplicity One of these things is not like the others! Python's complexity has been increasing rapidly (e.g. walrus operator, match statement, increasingly baroque type hints) - has this put you off the language at all?

I started programming with Python years and years ago. My journey has led me to preferring low-level languages (currently in a Zig bout), and revisiting Python has been a disappointing experience. Not necessarily bad , but instead of focusing efforts where it really matters, such as eliminating GIL, they seem to be focused on adding new syntactic sugar.

They are very much focusing efforts on eliminating GIL.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#389

Post by somethingor »

codedokode wrote: post #211
kuon wrote: post #46

Try zig, it is C with a bit of polish.

I saw mentions of Zig here often, so I decided to look at the docs to see what features it has. I had to scroll through all the docs only to find myself disappointed by the fact that Zig doesn't help with memory management in any way and advices to use comments and careful coding instead. And what adds to the disappointment is that its plus/minus operators do not catch overflow. If I wanted undefined behaviour, I cou…

> plus/minus operators do not catch overflow

They do (in Debug and ReleaseSafe modes)

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#390

Post by int_19h »

wruza wrote: post #43
anta40 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Pascal is still alive.

From what I remember about Ada, it is basically Pascal for rockets.

Only in terms of syntax. Feature-wise it's more like C++ but everything is explicit.
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