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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#211

Post by pjmlp »

dakimov wrote: post #208
shadowmint wrote: post #22

It also has a few downsides: - The build system is broken. vs. make. qmake. cmake. autotools. scons. 'modern' makefiles (>_> what does that even mean? Yes, I'm looking at you Google) There's a whole ecosystem of tools out there to solve this. - There are a few rubbish IDEs, most of which support c as a second class candidate. VS has officially abandoned C; xcode grudgingly supports it. The CDT is mediocre. There's li…

By the way, I refactor C with regexps and text utils. In UNIX a pretty complicated refactoring can be done with a shell oneliner. This method actually rules. C allows that because it does not have namespaces. C is minimalistic so that it allows working with it with minimalistic tools rather comfortably.

Really?!

Have you ever looked at what InteliJ allows as refactoring tools?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#212

Post by Locke1689 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #201
Locke1689 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing kernel code in C for about 8 years, including a hardware virtualization subsystem for use on HPCs. I used to teach Network Security and Penetration, but I lost interest in security and moved on to programming language development. My code, in any language, is full of bugs. The difference is that in C my bugs turn into major security vulnerabilities. C is also a terrible language in that you never wr…

Based on that I will buy you your beverage of choice at any conference you choose :) P:S: I've probably written commercial stuff you work with and also I don't give a shit if you give a shit, if you see where I am coming from. I have a pretty good idea of what the compiler will do and I will be pissed off if it doesn't do that. It normally does.

Thanks. I hope you didn't take my first comment as an insult.

What I meant by that is C is not just something you sit down with after skimming the specification and "bang out." There are years of community "inherited knowledge" on how to write C so it doesn't result in disaster. The very need for these practices exemplifies the flaws in C as a language -- by the very nature of working around these vulnerabilities, you acknowledge that they are vulnerabilities. Thus, if one doesn't see C's issues then one is doomed to C's mistakes (this sentence is very strange when read out loud).

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#213

Post by stephencanon »

SeanDav wrote: post #109
madhadron wrote: post #53

Oh 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…

I believe he actually intends to talk about the C abstract machine, which is a well-defined technical term (and is actually used extensively in the C standard).

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#214

Post by pjmlp »

slurry wrote: post #148
geophile wrote: post #46

C/C++/Java. A programmer's version of Rock/Paper/Scissors. Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal), I started out in C, many years ago. I found myself using macros and libraries to provide useful combinations of state and functions. I was reinventing objects and found C++. I was a very happy user of C++ for many years, starting very early on (cfront days). But I was burned by th…

> Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal) A side effect of C universalization, especially with open source, is that people forget all about that pre-history. Hacker culture now is mostly C/Unix with a dash of Lisp and Smalltalk heritage. But from what I remember of microcomputer culture in the early 80s, hackers in the field were doing line-numbered Basic and Assembly language -…

I was doing Turbo Pascal with some C only when requested to do so.

In the university UNIX forced me to move to C and later on C++. P2C was the only available Pascal compiler and a joke when compared with Turbo Pascal.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#215

Post by smosher »

eropple wrote: post #117
SeanDav wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

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.

C does no such thing. That is the job of the MMU, and C has nothing to say about it. You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that a language without a runtime somehow has a VM. That's nonsense.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#216

Post by silentbicycle »

digeridoo wrote: post #154
silentbicycle wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be less confusing to say "C's underlying model of computation".

What's so confusing about the term virtual machine? It's an abstraction of the underlying machine.

The term "virtual machine" is already pretty overloaded. This isn't referring to virtualized hardware in the VMWare sense or a language/platform virtual machine in the JVM sense. Rather, it's talking about how C's abstraction of the hardware has the Von Neumann bottleneck baked into it, so it clashes with fundamentally different architectures like the Burroughs 5000's.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#217

Post by oscargrouch »

popee wrote: post #180
jfb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't understand what "virtual machine" means in this context, why are you posting?

Maybe because he uses C and have never heard someone refering to VM and C in same sentence. I'm also interested in this because i also don't get wtf is "C VM". He could be refering to layer below which includes hardware and OS combo. You know, memory pages, translations, ... Is he talking about that? :-)

He´s using the term VM, as a machine abstraction, wich C really is, in the same perspective the OS is a VM..

it will abstract you away, from device drivers, processor assembly, memory, (using files to represent a collection of data blocks in a block device)

C is a VM. but not the same way the Java VM is a vm.. cause that is a VM on top of another VM (OS and processor assembly)

its a software abstraction of a hardware system? its a VM.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#218

Post by pjmlp »

knightni wrote: post #90
geophile wrote: post #46

C/C++/Java. A programmer's version of Rock/Paper/Scissors. Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal), I started out in C, many years ago. I found myself using macros and libraries to provide useful combinations of state and functions. I was reinventing objects and found C++. I was a very happy user of C++ for many years, starting very early on (cfront days). But I was burned by th…

C# is an improvement in this regard - it at least gives you structs for when you need to store related data together without any greater overhead than you'd have in C. Unfortunately unless you're on windows it's not that fast compared to Java.

I still hope that Microsoft will eventually make Bartok part of the standard .NET tooling and with that a proper native implementation for C#.

Actually they are doing something like that already with MDIL in WP8.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#219

Post by popee »

shadowmint wrote: post #22

It also has a few downsides: - The build system is broken. vs. make. qmake. cmake. autotools. scons. 'modern' makefiles (>_> what does that even mean? Yes, I'm looking at you Google) There's a whole ecosystem of tools out there to solve this. - There are a few rubbish IDEs, most of which support c as a second class candidate. VS has officially abandoned C; xcode grudgingly supports it. The CDT is mediocre. There's li…

> There are no frameworks for doing common high productivity tasks in C, only low level system operations, or > vastly complicated frameworks with terrible apis (>_> GTK). > I'll just whip up a C REST service that talks to mysql and point nginx at it. Um... yeah. I'm sure there's > an easy way to do that. ...perhaps...?

Search for libfcgi. It's nice and simple C library that can be used behind nginx and as the matter of fact anything that supports fcgi. In this case routes are defined on nginx. But just think a bit, it's nice little framework ;-)

Btw used exactly that few months ago.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#220

Post by sp4rki »

jerf wrote: post #185
sp4rki wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is and will (probably) always be a high level language by definition. That it's categorized as a lower level high level language than say Python or Ruby does not magically make it a low level language. There are low level languages which map mnemonics to instruction sets and high level languages that provide an abstraction over having to use the former and are more akin to the written word. That hasn't changed just…

A categorization that contains all but one language (Assembler) is not a useful categorization. Besides, why die on this hill? So everybody suddenly concedes that, fine, C is a "high level language". Is anybody's opinions going to be changed? No. So, how about we stick to useful definitions, and agree that in modern times C is a low-level language, and, likewise, understand that agreeing to that isn't going to change…

But that's exactly the point I was trying to make, albeit I wasn't very good at getting it across the internetz. Assembler is not truly "one language" it's actually a collection of mnemonics that are all extremely similar but based on specific architectures and instruction sets.

The point I want to get across is that for you C is a low level language. To the guy programming a fancy toaster in whatever version of an Assembly language C is a high level language. To be anally retentive and follow your comment about the ranking of languages, if I follow that logic then the only two low level languages would be C, Assembly, and perhaps a compiler complier circa the early 70's that whose name I cant remember. The difference between Assembler and C is extremely jarring in comparison to the difference between C and Javascript (for example).

One thing to note is that C is used a lot for low level systems programming and because of it it's so commonly described as a low level programming language. That said, writing low level systems programs does not mean that we're exclusively using a low level language to do so.

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