The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#1

Post by daschl1 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 2:49 PM UTC

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
damienkatz.net

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#2

Post by cageface » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:11 PM UTC

C is a fantastic high level language.

Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concurrency primitives is just the wrong choice for any application that doesn't need the kind of low-level control C provides.

Go ahead and jump on the bandwagon but don't come crying to me when you wind up with an unmaintainable mess riddled with security holes and fiendishly subtle memory errors.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#3

Post by skrebbel » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:11 PM UTC

To nitpick on a single statement:

> C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language.

What? Despite all its shortcomings, Java in a modern IDE effectively has zero build time. The level of interactivity is as fast as that of interpreted languages. I haven't seen anyone manage this with C yet.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#4

Post by zvrba » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:18 PM UTC

Oh, spare me, high-level language that can't even do arithmetic properly. It's anything but "damn successful as an abstraction over the underlying machine".

Case in point: Whenever you're doing signed arithmetic, and it overflows, you're in the land of undefined behaviour. (See here for an example of how this can bite you: http://thiemonagel.de/2010/01/signed-integer-overflow/)

Another case in point: type-punning with through pointer casting is also UB. [Going through union is legal though.]

I'm pretty sure the author hasn't written a line of ANSI-C compliant code in his life, otherwise he'd never write something like this.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#5

Post by voidlogic » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:20 PM UTC

Its often worked out well to write the 10% most CPU bound parts of large Java or PHP applications in C. C defiantly has its place.

I wonder if this gentlemen has tried Go? If he is a big C fan, Go might be a great choice for the other 90%. Not only is Go a safer version of C with lots of great modern features, it integrates very well with C via cGo.

If memory usage and speed are your preeminent concerns, C is certainly a force to be reckoned with: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-...

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#6

Post by galaktor » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

"I always have it in the back of my head that I want to make a slightly better C. Just to clean up some of the rough edges and fix some of the more egregious problems."

I immediately thought of this: "Go is like a better C, from the guys that didn’t bring you C++" — Ikai Lan [1]

And that's what it feels like to me when I use it.

[1] http://go-lang.cat-v.org/quotes

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#7

Post by dschiptsov » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

Why not just stay with the definition that C is a portable assembler to white OSes and Lisps?)

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#8

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:24 PM UTC

1) Pick a popular language

2) Figure out something controversial to say about it and a justification for that

3) Write it up and post it to reddit, HN, &c

4) Enjoy the hits

EDIT: Which is enabled by this - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037649

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#9

Post by jsaxton86 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:25 PM UTC

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

You can wind up with "an unmaintanable mess riddled with security holes" in any language -- that's not unique to C. Regarding the flaws you have mentioned in C:

Its flaws are very very well known, and this is a virtue. All languages and implementations have gotchas and hangups. C is just far more upfront about it. And there are a ton of static and runtime tools to help you deal with the most common and dangerous mistakes. That some of the most heavily used and reliable software in the world is built on C is proof that the flaws are overblown, and easy to detect and fix.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#10

Post by henrik_w » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:25 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #3

To nitpick on a single statement: > C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language. What? Despite all its shortcomings, Java in a modern IDE effectively has zero build time. The level of interactivity is as fast as that of interpreted languages. I haven't seen anyone manage this with C yet.

Agree completely about zero build time!

I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development for the last 4 years, and before that I used C and C++ using Emacs for 7 years.

I am way more productive in IntelliJ IDEA than I was before. One reason is the instant feedback on syntax errors when I type the code. I don't need to compile to see them, as I used to in C and C++. Another reason is the navigation support you get in an IDE.

I've written more about the differences in development environment here: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/17/programmer-productivity-em...