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C Is Best (2025)

sqlite.org

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Re: C Is Best (2025)

#131

Post by wat10000 »

baranul wrote: post #34

Every project and programmer shouldn't feel they have to justify their choice not to use Rust (or Zig), who seem to be strangely and disproportionately pushed on Hacker News and specific other social media platforms. This includes the pressure, though a bit less in recent years, to use OOP. If they are getting good results with C and without OOP, and people like the product, then those from outside the project should…

Every serious project should be able to justify its choice of tools. "Because I feel like it" is fine for hobby projects or open-source passion projects, but production-worthy software should have reasoning behind its choices. That reasoning can be something like "it's most effective for us because we know it better" but it should be a deliberate, measured choice.

SQLite is an example of an extremely high quality software project. That encompasses not only the quality of the software itself, but the project management around it. That includes explaining various design choices, and this document explaining the choice of language is just one of many such explanations.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#132

Post by ethin »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #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 l…

> This is no longer true. Rust, Zig and likely others satisfy this requirements.

Rust and Zig satisfy this by being C ABI-compatible when explicitly requested. I'm pretty sure that that solution is not actually what the author meant. When you don't explicitly use `extern "C"` in Rust or `export` in Zig, the ABI is completely undefined and undocumented. I would go as far as arguing that the ABI problem, with Rust at least, is even worse than the ABI problem C++ has. Especially since Distros are (if memory serves) starting to ship Rust crates...

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#133

Post by coliveira »

titzer wrote: post #125
runjake wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: Along with the never ending pressure to migrate a project to new shiny, there is a lot of momentum against C and other memory-unsafe languages. The US government recently called on everyone to stop using them and move to memory-safe languages. Regardless, there are practices and tools that significantly help produce safe C code and I feel like more effort should be spent teaching C programmers those. Edit: T…

C was my first language, more than thirty years ago. I've heard (and probably myself made) the same arguments over and over and over. But those arguments are lame and wrong. C cannot be made safe (at scale). It's like asbestos. In fact, C is a hazardous material in exactly the same way as asbestos. Naturally occurring, but over industrialized and deployed far too widely before its dangers were known. Still has its us…

Stop spreading FUD.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#134

Post by asveikau »

kibwen wrote: post #87
nialv7 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, which is a perfectly acceptable default considering that most code is not in a position to observe allocation failures (because of OS-level overcommit, which is nearly always a good thing), and furthermore most code is not in a position to do anything other than crash in an OOM scenario. If you still want to have control over this without going full no_std, Rust has Vec::try_reserve to grow a Vec while checking…

I used to think this way many years ago, then I saw my own code in production hit OOM errors and manage to recover, and even log what was happening so I could read about it later.

After those experiences I agree with the sibling comment that calls your position "bullshit". I think people come to your conclusion when they haven't experienced a system that can handle it, so they're biased to think it's impossible to do. Since being able to handle it is not the default in so many languages and one very prominent OS, fewer people understand it is possible.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#135

Post by monocasa »

irishcoffee wrote: post #126
runjake wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: Along with the never ending pressure to migrate a project to new shiny, there is a lot of momentum against C and other memory-unsafe languages. The US government recently called on everyone to stop using them and move to memory-safe languages. Regardless, there are practices and tools that significantly help produce safe C code and I feel like more effort should be spent teaching C programmers those. Edit: T…

> The US government recently called on everyone to stop using them and move to memory-safe languages. The US government also _really_ (no sarcasm) cares about safety-critical code that can be formally verified, depending on program requirements. DO-178, LOR1, el. al. Developing those toolchains costs tens of millions, getting them certified costs tens of millions, and then buying those products to use costs 500k-1.5m…

https://blog.pictor.us/rust-is-do-178-certifiable/

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#136

Post by jcranmer »

publicdebates wrote: post #93
jll29 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, Rust can compile old code. But you can't upgrade that old Rust code to new Rust code very easily. The fact that C was effectively "born old" means you can take a C89 program and compile it as C23 and it should simply work, with extremely minimal changes, if any. That's a killer feature when you're thinking in decades. Which SQLite is.

When clang was first coming about, the number one cause of Debian packages failing to build with clang was that (at the time) clang defaulted to C99 whereas gcc defaulted to C89.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#137

Post by Supernaut »

baq wrote: post #108
baranul wrote: post #34

Every project and programmer shouldn't feel they have to justify their choice not to use Rust (or Zig), who seem to be strangely and disproportionately pushed on Hacker News and specific other social media platforms. This includes the pressure, though a bit less in recent years, to use OOP. If they are getting good results with C and without OOP, and people like the product, then those from outside the project should…

I mostly agree, but the OOP is most definitely not in vogue on HN for the past decade at least, arguably far longer than that (think Rust pre-1.0, Go 1.0 times).

Absolutely. Our thought leaders have been pushing functional programming for a long time now.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#138

Post by ok123456 »

irishcoffee wrote: post #126
runjake wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: Along with the never ending pressure to migrate a project to new shiny, there is a lot of momentum against C and other memory-unsafe languages. The US government recently called on everyone to stop using them and move to memory-safe languages. Regardless, there are practices and tools that significantly help produce safe C code and I feel like more effort should be spent teaching C programmers those. Edit: T…

> The US government recently called on everyone to stop using them and move to memory-safe languages. The US government also _really_ (no sarcasm) cares about safety-critical code that can be formally verified, depending on program requirements. DO-178, LOR1, el. al. Developing those toolchains costs tens of millions, getting them certified costs tens of millions, and then buying those products to use costs 500k-1.5m…

The DOD also made the Waterfall method THE standard software development process.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#139

Post by erichocean »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #101
alexpadula wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. We will see how Limbo turns out :)

I forgot what Limbo was, Rust rewrite of SQLite, now called Turso. https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso I could see it being useful for pure Rust projects once its completed. I mean in Java / Kotlin land, I prefer to use H2 in some cases over SQLite since its native to the platform and H2 is kind of nice altogether. I could see myself only using this in Rust in place of SQLite if its easy to integrate and use on th…

The equivalent "platform native" database for Clojure is Datalevin [0], which has a Datomic-like Datalog query language with SQLite-style semantics. Recommended.

[0] https://github.com/juji-io/datalevin

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#140

Post by brabel »

alansaber wrote: post #56
baranul wrote: post #34

Every project and programmer shouldn't feel they have to justify their choice not to use Rust (or Zig), who seem to be strangely and disproportionately pushed on Hacker News and specific other social media platforms. This includes the pressure, though a bit less in recent years, to use OOP. If they are getting good results with C and without OOP, and people like the product, then those from outside the project should…

We (especially management) are trained to always want shiny new thing. Also it's an easy line of dialogue.

Funny how managers get blamed for both wanting new things and for not wanting new things. In the Java 6 days every dev wanted to upgrade to 7 and later 8… but the meme was that their manager wouldn’t ever let them.
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