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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

damienkatz.net

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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#221

Post by dakimov »

kyrra wrote: post #65
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…

> It's a tool for some jobs; definitely not all. I'd completely agree. I would not use C for doing any web platform work (writing a REST service as you say). I may write a webserver in C if I had tight memory constraints. Where I see C still being very useful: embedded applications, drivers, and latency sensitive code. When you are trying to push the most I/O possible through a network interface or disk interface, C…

I have done low-level and mobile programming on very restricted platforms and I cannot see any reason why in the world I would use C instead of C++. Basically there is always an opportunity to use C++ if you can use C. Myths that C++ is slower are spread by people who just do not know C++ well or are not skilled/clever enough to use it.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#222

Post by pjmlp »

dionidium wrote: post #44
mschaef wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a barely functional string type There's a string type in C? All I see are character arrays and a few (poorly thought out) conventions for using them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string

Forget to place that NULL in the right place and boom!

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#223

Post by pjmlp »

michaelochurch wrote: post #42
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.

I'd rather have a Repl than a "modern IDE". C does not have or need a Repl because it's not designed for giant single programs anyway. Unix is the C Repl.

CERN researchers don't share your opinion:

http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#224

Post by scott_s »

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.

For the same reason that if you put a hunk of chocolate in the oven and called it "hot chocolate," people would be confused that it's not a warm beverage of chocolate and milk.

That is, the phrase "virtual machine" is usually assumed to be the name for a piece of software that pretends to be some particular hardware. It is less commonly used to mean a "virtual machine", that is, not a noun unto itself, but the adjective virtual followed by the noun machine.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#225

Post by dakimov »

pjmlp wrote: post #211
dakimov wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IntelliJ Idea for Java?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#226

Post by popee »

abrichr wrote: post #88
larskinn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foul depths of hell? I've never programmed in C or C++, but this seems to me to be a map from strings to vectors of strings. Reads easily. I don't like the :: namespace separator, but what can you do...

but what can you do... using namespace std; map > foo;

It's ugly to see shift operator here? :-)

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#227

Post by hobbyist »

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…

Isnt high level relative. I was once speaking to a friend who is an electrical engineer. While discussing some dsp stuff with him I explained some asm instructions, and suddenly he says you are going high level :) I am pretty sure if he speaks to some physics/semiconductor guy he probably will get the same answer back from them

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#229

Post by vannevar »

When you're an expert in C, you tend to forget how much you've really learned. And not just about the language itself, or the available libraries, but about your own coding style. As an experienced programmer, you have habits and intuition that make developing and debugging your code vastly easier than for a novice. The reason that C has given so much ground to a language like Java is not that Java is intrinsically more powerful, but that novice and intermediate programmers can be much more productive with it from the start. Companies don't want to hire a 10-year C veteran at $125/hr to code up their CRUD app, even if one were readily available. They want to be able to hire interchangeable $50/hr Java guys with a bit of experience, who won't have to waste days at a time trying to track down intermittent memory problems or re-writing the wheel because they aren't aware someone wrote a C lib for something Java has built-in.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#230

Post by scott_s »

smosher wrote: post #215
eropple wrote: post #117

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. 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.

See the above discussion about what he meant by "virtual machine." It's not what you think it is, and it does exist.
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