Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The C3 Programming Language

c3-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 270 posts

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#41

Post by contificate »

gritzko wrote: post #11

I wonder, at which point it is worth it to make a language? I personally implemented generics, slices and error propagation in C… that takes some work, but doable. Obviously, C stdlib goes to the trash bin, but there is not much value in it anyway. Not much code, and very obsolete. Meanwhile, a compiler is an enormously complicated story. I personally never ever want to write a compiler, cause I already had more fun…

> Meanwhile, a compiler is an enormously complicated story.

I don't intend to downplay the effort involved in creating a large project, but it's evident to me that there's a class of "better C" languages for which LLVM is very well suited.

On purely recreational grounds, one can get something small off the ground in an afternoon with LLVM. It's very enjoyable and has a low barrier to entry, really.

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#43

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

gkbrk wrote: post #38
epage wrote: post #24

I think the switch statement design is a foot gun: defaults to fall-through when empty and break when there is a body. https://c3-lang.org/language-overview/examples/#enum-and-swi...

This feels very natural though, in a "principle of least surprise" kinda way. This is what you'd expect a properly designed switch statement to do.

Least surprise to who? Are there any other mainstream languages that behave this way?

I think consistency is the best correlate of least surprise, so having case statements that sometimes fall though, sometimes not, seems awful.

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#44

Post by zephen »

" the C-like for programmers who like C."

Sounds intriguing. But then, the first thing I noticed in their example is a double-colon scope operator.

I understand that it's part of the culture (and Rust, C#, and many other languages), but I find the syntax itself ugly.

I dunno. Maybe I have the visual equivalent of misophonia, in addition to the auditory version, but :: and x I like C. But I abhor C++ with a passion, partly because of what, to me, is jarring syntax. A lot of languages have subsequently adopted this sort of syntax, but it really didn't have that much thought put into it at the beginning, other than that Stroustrup went out of his way to use different symbols for different kinds of hierarchies, because some people were confused.

Source: https://medium.com/@alexander.michaud/the-double-colon-opera...

Think about that. The designer of a language that is practically focused on polymorphism went out of his way to _not_ overload the '.' operator for two things that are about as close semantically as things ever get (hierarchical relationships), simply because some of his customers found that overloading to be confusing. (And yet, 'I saw in another comment here just now that one of the differentiators between zig and C3 is that C3 allows operator overloading.

Honestly, that's in C3's favor (in my book), so why don't they start by overloading '.' and get rid of '::' ?

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#46

Post by nathan_compton »

zephen wrote: post #44

" the C-like for programmers who like C." Sounds intriguing. But then, the first thing I noticed in their example is a double-colon scope operator. I understand that it's part of the culture (and Rust, C#, and many other languages), but I find the syntax itself ugly. I dunno. Maybe I have the visual equivalent of misophonia, in addition to the auditory version, but :: and x I like C. But I abhor C++ with a passion, p…

As a long time lisper I can't stand how much syntax languages have and I think of excess syntax as a sign of a childish mind, but what can you do?

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#47

Post by impoppy »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #18
impoppy wrote: post #12

I haven’t tried C3 myself, but I happened to interact a lot with Christopher Lerno, Ginger Bill and multiple Zig maintainers before. Was great to learn that C3, Odin and Zig weren’t competing with each other but instead learn from each other and discuss various trade-offs they made when designing their languages. Generally was a very pleasant experience to learn from them on how and why they implemented building diff…

> weren’t competing with each other but instead learn from each other What is the difference? Using polite words to communicate?

Competing with each other would be trying to one-up each other feature-wise, whereas what I have witnessed was things like discussing trade-offs made in different languages and juggling around ideas on if some feature from language A would make sense in language B too.

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#48

Post by fwip »

loeg wrote: post #42

They named Result (or Expected) Optional ? No, no, "optional" means "T or empty." Not "T or E." https://c3-lang.org/language-fundamentals/functions/#functio...

I share your distaste for arbitrarily renaming concepts. However, I think if you only have one of the two in the language, Optional is the clearer name.

A result is already the informal name of the outcome or return value of every regular operation or function call, whereas an Optional is clearly not a regular thing.

I also think, from a pragmatic systems-design point of view, it might make sense to only support the Either/Result pattern. It's not too much boilerplate to add a `faultdef KeyNotInMap`, and then it's clear to the consumer why a real answer was not returned.

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#50

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #29

We have solved the better C issue, but nobody seems keen on solving the better compiler issue Why do we still have to recompile the whole program everytime we make a change, the only project i am aware of who wants to tackle this is Zig with binary patching, and that's imo where we should focus our effort on.. C3 does look interesting tho, the idea of ABI compatibility with C is pretty ingenious, you get to tap into…

> Why do we still have to recompile the whole program everytime we make a change

Are you talking about compiling, or linking, or both?

GNU ld has supported incremental linking for ages, and make systems only recompile things based on file level dependencies.

I guess recompilation could perhaps be smarter based on what changed or was added/deleted to a module definition (e.g C header file), but this would seem difficult to get right. Maybe you just add a new function to a module, so no need to recompile other modules that use it, right? Except what if there is now a name clash and they would fail if recompiled?

Post reply on HN