Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. I don’t think I miswrote yes I’m talking about a larger language like c++.
Forgot to switch the account?
[deleted]
C Is Best (2025)
61–70 of 574 posts
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#62> Nearly all systems have the ability to call libraries written in C. This is not true of other implementation languages.
This is no longer true. Rust, Zig and likely others satisfy this requirements.
> Safe languages usually want to abort if they encounter an out-of-memory (OOM) situation. SQLite is designed to recover gracefully from an OOM. It is unclear how this could be accomplished in the current crop of safe languages.
This is a major annoyance in the rust stdlib. Too many interfaces can panic (and not just in case of an OOM), and some of them don’t even document this.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#63> Libraries written in C++ or Java can generally only be used by applications written in the same language. It is difficult to get an application written in Haskell or Java to invoke a library written in C++. On the other hand, libraries written in C are callable from any programming language.
Not saying they should have picked C++ but that's a bit untrue. It's quite easy given some thought into the API to invoke C++ code in basically any language which can invoke C code, since you can wrap a C++ implementation in a C interface. I've done it multiple time throughout my career (that ended up being called from Python, Swift, Objective-C/C++, Swift, Java, and Kotlin).
And as a side note, you don't have to do object-oriented programming in C++ if you don't want to.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#64I am a pretty serious "Rustacean", but I like to think "for the right reasons". A rewrite in Rust of the main project would make very little sense, unless there is some objective the project wants that can't be met with C (see below). This person presents a well thought out case on why it makes little sense to rewrite, especially in the final section. Rust is great for many things, but when you have something old tha…
I agree. We will see how Limbo turns out :)
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see Steve Yegge unleash his Gas Town with a convoy or whatever it's called to rewrite the sqlite in Rust obviously preserving 100% test coverage. Results are a guaranteed bombshell regardless of whether it succeeds or fails.
What’s Steve Yegge got to do with Rust? And who’s gonna sponsor some 10,000 hours to “rewrite the sqlite in Rust obviously preserving 100% test coverage”? Will he do it just for the memes, or did you think Rust is so cool there is no effort involved? Let’s be serious now.
What's not serious? He's got a tool which he claims should be able to handle projects of this scale, the existing test coverage is what makes it not immediately impossible and about the memes, have you read his gas town post? Of course it's for the memes, but more importantly it'll validate his vision of the future in the eyes of quite literally everyone if successful.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#66> Rust needs to mature a little more, stop changing so fast, and move further toward being old and boring. One of the very strange things about C is that it is designed by a committee that is inherently conservative and prefers to not add new features, especially if they have any chance of breaking any compatibility. This seems necessary before Rust ever becomes an old, boring language. But I don't see Rust ever goin…
> Rust's philosophy, which is to find the best solution to the problems it's trying to solve, at any cost, including breaking compatibility, at least to some degree. But the Rust team found a great way to avoid breaking backward compatibility: old code gets automatically compiled by the old version of the compiler, whereas more recent code is treated with the latest version of the compiler. That is much better IMHO t…
> old code gets automatically compiled by the old version of the compile
That's not what happens. You always use the same version of the compiler. It's just that the newer compiler version also knows several older dialects (known as editions) of the language.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#67> Rust needs a mechanism to recover gracefully from OOM errors. Linus also brought this up: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099
None of Rust's language features allocate; not arrays, not closures, not iterators. Everything is stack-allocated by default. Rust code doesn't malloc unless you use a library that calls malloc; in other words, exactly like C. Rust fully supports turning off the parts of the standard library that perform allocation, and this is precisely what embedded code and the Linux kernel does. So Rust already gives you full con…
well, as an example, Vec::push doesn't have a way to report allocation failure. it will just panic, which is not acceptable in the kernel.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#68> Rust needs a mechanism to recover gracefully from OOM errors. Linus also brought this up: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099
None of Rust's language features allocate; not arrays, not closures, not iterators. Everything is stack-allocated by default. Rust code doesn't malloc unless you use a library that calls malloc; in other words, exactly like C. Rust fully supports turning off the parts of the standard library that perform allocation, and this is precisely what embedded code and the Linux kernel does. So Rust already gives you full con…
Yep, the “split” between core and std is brilliant. It enables so many usecases: one example I ran into recently is compiling Rust (core) to eBPF.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#69The bit about why not OOP seems a bit old. I think we're past a point where people are going for OOP as the default shape of code. Overall, it makes sense. C is a systems language, and a DB is a system abstraction. You shouldn't need to build a deep hierarchy of abstractions on top of C, just stick with the lego blocks you have. If the project had started in 2016, maybe they would have gone for c++, which is a differ…
I think they would have still gone with C. I still do.
The author of ZMQ had an article about regretting not using C over C++.
Picking Rust for a "modern" version of SQLite could easily go down a similar route in the end.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130053844/https://250bpm.co...
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#70> Rust needs to mature a little more, stop changing so fast, and move further toward being old and boring. One of the very strange things about C is that it is designed by a committee that is inherently conservative and prefers to not add new features, especially if they have any chance of breaking any compatibility. This seems necessary before Rust ever becomes an old, boring language. But I don't see Rust ever goin…
Calling C "strange" for being conservative and not wanting to break things is rather odd. It's one of the "great" things in that sense. "Stable" could be another description.