"C is a weak, statically typed language"
Wouldn't that imply that a variable of one type could be coerced into another type?
I would say C is strong typed...
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
111–120 of 394 posts
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#112Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…
modern FORTRAN is absolutely horrific, to the extent that F77 is far more popular than more recent flavors (like F90 or F95). It suffers from the same types of problems that the author identifies in C++ and Java. As for standard library, I learned from K&R and have never been surprised by the library (insofar as I can reasonably predict what will happen, given the guidelines). I cannot say that about the C++ standard…
FORTRAN 77 is far more popular because it took so long for a GNU FORTRAN 9x compiler to appear, and meanwhile there are millions of lines of FORTRAN 77 in enormous libraries.
The problem with the standard library is that it is tiny and its basic types are often ill designed. Certainly it's fairly consistent, and so fairly unsurprising, but that's not the argument.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#113I'm a language design buff, so you might be able to guess my biases: FP is good, OO is bad, every language should have higher-order functions, yadda yadda. I finally decided to get a deeper knowledge of C, something I've been saying I "should do" for years. I'm learning it via Zed Shaw's Learn C The Hard Way and I'm very impressed by the language. It does what it does very well. I wouldn't use it for a complex web ap…
Interesting, I would have considered deep knowledge of C a prerequisite to being a language design buff. Did you have experience implementing languages?
No, most of my experience was with high-level languages like Haskell, Python, and Clojure, with my original interest being more in design than implementation. One of the reasons I'm learning C is to have a better grasp of implementation, and eventually (if needed) be able to competently implement languages.
For most of my time, I focused more on user experience (syntax, type system, workflow) and its effects on development culture. Watching language choices make or break companies made me very opinionated. That said, as I get older, I'm finding it harder to call specific languages "good" or "bad". They all have their niches. Enterprise Java is horrible, but that's not James Gosling's fault.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#114Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…
> So, before writing about the glories of C, please go familiarize yourself with modern FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal's compiler and environment, a good Smalltalk like Squeak or Pharo, and the state of modern pipelines processor architectures.
All true, but how are you going to implement a single project using just the best parts of FORTRAN, ALGOL 60, Turbo Pascal and Smalltalk?
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://developer.gnome.org/glib/ http://apr.apache.org/ Choose one.
That's kind of the point. Why do you have to choose? Why isn't it possible with the language and its standard libraries? What happens when you mix APR code with glib-using code?
1. Because there is no standard defining that.
2. Because there is no standard defining that.
3. Nothing. Functions in both libraries are prefixed to avoid name clashes.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#116Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…
None of what you said supports your initial claim that the author is ignorant. In fact, even if we pretend that everything you said is true, none of it contradicts the article, or the authors conclusions. Yes, C has lots of areas where other languages are better. And yet, it is still the most practical language to use because of the combination of things that it does well.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#117Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…
Madhadron, you make a lot of claims but provide no detail. Also using terms like "virtual machine" with respect to C is plainly ridiculous and a case of bullshit baffles brains. Turbo Pascal vs C? Really? In its time Turbo Pascal was an amazing piece of software but in the grand scheme of things it is a pimple compared to the whale that is C. Please compare all software written in Turbo Pascal as opposed to C if you…
> Madhadron, you make a lot of claims but provide no detail. Also using terms like "virtual machine" with respect to C is plainly ridiculous and a case of bullshit baffles brains.
C as a very thin virtual machine is a common conception and not an incorrect one--C runs on many systems with noncontiguous memory segments but presents it as a single contiguous space, for example. The idea of C as a virtual machine is much of the basis of LLVM, and to the best of my knowledge I've never worked on a computer where C represented the underlying hardware without significant abstractions.
If you're going to accuse somebody of trolling, you should know what you're talking about first.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm also a novice on low-level stuff, but if I had to guess... I'd guess that the virtual machine of C pertains to the addressing and the presentation of memory as a "giant array of bytes". Stack addresses start high and "grow down", heap addresses start low. These addresses need not exist on the machine. For example, two running C processes can have 0x3a4b7e pointing to different places in machine memory (which prev…
C pointer aliasing defeats certain compiler optimizations that can be made in other languages, and is frequently brought up in C vs FORTRAN comparisons. I think that's probably what the GP had in mind.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#119Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…
Madhadron, you make a lot of claims but provide no detail. Also using terms like "virtual machine" with respect to C is plainly ridiculous and a case of bullshit baffles brains. Turbo Pascal vs C? Really? In its time Turbo Pascal was an amazing piece of software but in the grand scheme of things it is a pimple compared to the whale that is C. Please compare all software written in Turbo Pascal as opposed to C if you…
If you don't understand what "virtual machine" means in this context, why are you posting?
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#120Regarding the performance of C, it is interesting to note that although hardly anyone does it, Java, for example, can still be very very low-level if you want.
You can still allocate a gigantic primitive array (say of Java 32-bits integers) and mess with it, including doing bit-trickery, etc. and that is amazingly fast.
When people want the uttermost speed in Java, they dodge objects as much as they can to prevent too much GC'ing.
For example that is how the people behind the amazing LMAX disruptor "pattern" (hardly a "pattern" in the OO sense) manage to handle, on a single thread, to process about 12 millions events... Per second. In Java.
"Thankfully" Java still allows to create a gigantic primitive array and to directly mess inside that array.