Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean, "DOW"
Department of Waterfall?
Department of War.
C Is Best (2025)
221–230 of 574 posts
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> strangely and disproportionately pushed on Hacker News There is literally nothing strange or disproportionate. It's incredibly obvious that new languages, that were designed by people who found older languages lacking, are of interest to groups of people interested in new applications of technology and who want to use their new languages. > then those from outside the project shouldn't really have any say on it. It…
I think it's more than just the normal amount for advocacy of a new language. Rust isn't the only "newer" language. I don't feel this kind of mentally strung pushing of say Kotlin or Scala or Go or, etc from their fans.
I'm not a Rust evangelist, but I'm glad that Rust evangelists exist.
I decided to try it for a medium-sized (~10k LoC) performance sensitive component recently and it has been an absolute joy to use.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every allocation must be checked at the point of allocation, which is "the default" C doesn't force you to check the allocation at all. The default behavior is to simply invoke undefined behavior the first time you use the returned allocation if it failed. In practice I've found most people write their own wrappers around malloc that at least crash - for example: https://docs.gtk.org/glib/memory.html PS. The curren…
> C doesn't force you to check the allocation at all. No one ever claimed it did; I said, and still do, that the in C , at any rate, the default is to check the returned value from memory allocations. And, that is true. The default in other language is not to recover.
> > C doesn't force you to check the allocation at all.
> No one ever claimed it did;
You specifically said
> Every allocation must be checked at the point of allocation
...
> the default is to check the returned value from memory allocations.
Default has a meaning, and it's what happens if you don't explicitly choose to do something else.
In libc - this is to invoke undefined behavior if the user uses the allocation.
In glib - the library that underpins half the linux desktop - this is to crash. This is an approach I've seen elsewhere as well to the point where I'm comfortable calling it "default" in the sense that people change their default behavior to it.
Nowhere that I've ever seen, in C, is it to make the user handle the error. I assume there are projects with santizers that do do that, I haven't worked on them, and they certainly don't make up the majority.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
86 race conditions compared to what baseline? This is a bit meaningless without benchmarking against other kernels
It's 1 compared to 86, 86 is the baseline.
But you need to control for lines of code at the very least — otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#225I agree that C is best. I think Rust is actually a language with some severe downsides, despite having including some very good ideas and C having some real issues. But it will take a couple of years before one can discuss this rationally without being flamed at.
If you want to spread this idea, it would probably help your cause if you pointed to what you think Rust does particularly poorly. Steep learning curve, npm-esque packaging?
The article gave many good reasons where Rust is lacking. The points you raise are also clearly issues. My main additional issues are the high complexity, the syntax, the lack of stability, compilation times (and monomorphization), and lack of alternate implementations. Ignoring the language itself, the aggressive and partially misleading negative and positive marketing.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#226Given SQLite's amazing battery of test code, it seems like it would be valuable, illuminating, and not too difficult to write a test implementation in Rust. Can you get the Rust implementation to pass the test suite? Either answer to that question would be interesting.
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#227The actual title is "Why Is SQLite Coded In C"
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#228WRONG! Plain and simple C is, by far, one of the current _LESS WORSE_ performant alternatives which can be used, actually, from low level to large applications. C syntax is already waaaaay to rich and complex (and ISO is a bit too much pushing feature creep over 5/10 years cycles).
That's the first time I've heard the C syntax being called "too rich". It's the epitome of succinctness IMHO (too a fault, even, or maybe I'm just old). Are you confusing it with C++? If so, you have a point.
As a Lisper I would consider C having too much syntax. 3 different kinds of brackets, a mix of prefix, suffix, and infix operators, both dot and hyphen + greater than symbol infixes for member access on structures depending on whether you're accessing members of a struct directly or from a struct pointer, semicolons at the end of every statement, the different ways of declaring imports,...
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#229> Safe languages usually want to abort if they encounter an out-of-memory (OOM) situation. SQLite is designed to recover gracefully from an OOM. As someone who runs into this problem a lot, this is pretty cool! Does anyone know how they can recover from this in SQLite?
> As someone who runs into this problem [OOM] a lot, this is pretty cool! Does anyone know how they can recover from this in SQLite? How are you running into it? If you're writing in C, idiomatic code works (check the return values of functions that allocate!) If you're in C++, Rust or similar, you have to write pretty non-idiomatically to recover from an allocation failure.
how exactly do you think C and C++ differ here?
Re: C Is Best (2025)
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more than just the normal amount for advocacy of a new language. Rust isn't the only "newer" language. I don't feel this kind of mentally strung pushing of say Kotlin or Scala or Go or, etc from their fans.
I think this is because of the gap in its target market -- Rust is firmly positioned to replace C and C++, which have a long history of safety issues. Kotlin is positioned to replace java, and besides a few quality-of-life improvements, it changes some syntax but very few semantics, so the gap is much smaller. Go was originally pitched as a C or C++ replacement, and it's very nice for deeply parallel programs like we…
Out of interest
> As a programmer that picks up a new language every 2-3 years (and one that is privileged to have an employer that tolerates this)
does this mean they allow you to tinker around on your own for this, or do you actually then start to deploy things to production written in the new language.
After having quite a long career as a programmer, I realised that if I were ever CTO at a startup, unless there was an absolute proven need to switch languages, I'd mandate only a single language for our (back end) stack. The cost of supporting different languages is just too high.