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C Is Best (2025)

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Re: C Is Best (2025)

#421

Post by tialaramex »

bluecalm wrote: post #378
tialaramex wrote: post #243

> But no other language claims to be faster than C for general-purpose programming, because none are. The "faster than C for general-purpose programming" is a pretty woolly claim so I'm not entirely surprised nobody claims that, but equally I think to be sure that "because none are" would need some serious caveats to make it true. In particular you're going to have to say you think it doesn't matter how much develope…

>>A project where C programmers spend five hours to make it run in 4 seconds is in this caveat "20% faster" than a project where Alt Lang programmers spend five minutes to make it run in 5 seconds - because only those seconds count. This is not how the real world works so it's a pretty nasty caveat. For any project with non-trivial amount of users the C programmer did better. I mean I know companies like to save mone…

I see a few people have been caught by this.

Databases are a problem space which can absorb all available effort. So if you spend five hours making thing U as fast as it could be that's five fewer hours you can dedicate to thing V or thing W, not to mention X, Y, Z and so on.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#422

Post by accelbred »

oconnor663 wrote: post #380
antirez wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also worth to note that the Rust design, in its theory, and the recent bug in the Linux kernel Rust code (the message passing abstraction used by Android), makes clear that: 1. With Rust, you may lower the exposure, but the same classes of bug still remain. And of course, all the other non memory related bugs. 2. With C you may, if you wish, develop a big sensibility to race conditions, and stay alert. In gener…

> With C you may, if you wish, develop a big sensibility to race conditions, and stay alert. In general it is possible that C programmers have their "bugs antenna" a bit more developed than other folks. I think there are effects in both directions here. In C you get burned , and the pain is memorable. In Rust you get forced into safe patterns immediately. I could believe that someone who has done only Rust might be m…

The amount of paranoia I need for unsafe Rust is orders of magnitudes higher than C. Keeping track of the many things that can implicity drop values and/or free memory, and figuring out if im handling raw pointers and reference conversions in a way that doesn't accidentally alias is painful. The C rules are fewer and simpler, and are also well known, and are aleviated and documented by guidelines like MISRA. Unsafe Rust has more rules, which seem underspecified and underdocumented, and also unstable. Known unknowns are preferable over unknown unknowns.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#423

Post by lapcat »

alexpadula wrote: post #351
lapcat wrote: post #48

This submission title has been editorialized, contrary to the HN guidelines. The article title is actually "Why Is SQLite Coded In C". Also, the article appears to be quite old, so the submission should have a year appended. See also previous discussions, the last of which was only a few months ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It was updated in 2025.

I just did a diff with the Wayback Machine. Have you? The only changes were a few minor typos fixed.

I would strongly urge you to read and respect the HN guidelines and FAQ. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#424

Post by lapcat »

psychoslave wrote: post #19

2017 at least[1] but "This page was last updated on 2025-05-09 15:56:17Z." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170701061906/https://sqlite.or...

The only changes in 2025 were a few minor typos fixed. Nothing substantial.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#425

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

uecker wrote: post #218
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original comment was edited after I replied.

Yes, sorry, apparently not quick enough. I actually do not think it is horrible. It is a nice language, but I still do not like it and see many downsides. What I hate though is how aggressively it is marketed. See my other response for details.

That is fair. Rust is my most used language, and I agree Rust has many downsides and pain points. But for my work, the positives outweigh the downsides of other languages I've used (including Python, Java, C++, and C).

But it ultimately depends on your situation. People elsewhere on this post are listing weaknesses of Rust that I consider to be strengths and vice versa.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#426

Post by gf000 »

donkeybeer wrote: post #159
misnome wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

Rust is absolutely novel in being the first, production-grade memory-safe low-level language.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#427

Post by runjake »

quesera wrote: post #274
zabzonk wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Department of War.

That is not the official name, and it is highly unlikely that it ever will be in the future.

It's worth pointing out the Department of Defense was named the Department of War for over 150 years, up until 1947.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#428

Post by llmslave2 »

alexpadula wrote: post #339
mkl95 wrote: post #331

C is like a classic car. It's cool and you might have fun with it, but if something goes wrong out there, there's a significant chance you'll end up in a very bad shape.

What! Classic cars are preferred. I'd trust an old muscle car more than a shiny new one ANY DAY OF THE WEEK. Ah gosh. New cars are trash. Never in my life had a good experience with a new car besides the smell. I've had many new cars and the car I drive today is a classic, I love it. Takes me everywhere, replace the parts and still goes. No rust. Can't say the same for a new car. I had a brand new truck a few years a…

Sounds like it's an accurate analogy after all haha

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#429

Post by UltraSane »

The performance/memory security tradeoffs that C made made sense when computers were 100000 times slower and not connected to the internet but now when nearly all software is connected to the Internet it is a disaster.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#430

Post by gf000 »

antirez wrote: post #168
pclmulqdq wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear "people rarely use unsafe rust" quite a lot, but every time I see a project or library with C-like performance, there's a _lot_ of unsafe code in there. Treating bugs in unsafe code as not being bugs in rust code is kind of silly, also.

Exactly. You don't need much unsafe if you use Rust to replace a Python project, for instance. If there is lower level code, high performances needs, things change.

High performance is not an on/off target. Safe rust really lets you express a lot of software patterns in a "zero-cost" way. Sure, there are a few patterns where you may need to touch unsafe, but safe rust itself is not slow by any means.
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