Memory management in C programs (2014)
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Memory management in C programs (2014)
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Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#2As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day.
For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me.
That must be how JS developers feel about the browser. The browser is a natural way to start learning programming for someone new to it these days. When I was growing up, we didn't really have JS and the web was brand new. I had to learn from QBasic's "Help" menu!
I bet there's an age correlation, too. I bet over a certain age, it's way more C programmers, and under it is way more JS people. (And above us is probably FORTRAN and above them is probably COBOL.)
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#3As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day. For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me. That must be…
I agree completely about C being the gateway to the computer. It really is the only way to go if you want to learn real programming. That doesn't mean I'm discounting JavaScript developers, but I like C better and it's more fun.
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#4As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day. For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me. That must be…
I agree completely about C being the gateway to the computer. It really is the only way to go if you want to learn real programming. That doesn't mean I'm discounting JavaScript developers, but I like C better and it's more fun.
I think you're right that C is a gateway to learning how computers work. But I think using the term "real programming" in any context is flame bait...
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#5As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day. For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me. That must be…
> I bet there's an age correlation, too.
Only 90's kids will get JS this.
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#6Hmm, for C programs I use https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/index.html or the more cut-down ccan/tal http://ccodearchive.net/info/tal.html
There's sometimes a great insight available in viewing your allocation hierarchy on a running program, too.
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#7> Sprintf(...)
Seriously? Why would anyone use sprintf() in 2013 without knowing the size of all possible arguments.
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#8As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day. For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me. That must be…
I used to write C but now I do Coffeescript/JS. When I was just starting in C (as a teenager) I'd get really excited to learn the GNU's C standard library. I wanted to know how to make better and better console applications and networking applications. It felt like there was a huge learning curve to using graphics toolkits. Now that I do JS I feel like Web APIs are the new "C standard library". I can make console or apps with a GUI. I can do more because there already exists a large amount of interfaces abstracted over things that would take me a while to learn. At the same time, people are always figuring out new ways to abuse existing web standards for fun and profit - like how page visibility was done before the Visibility API existed: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibi...
I like being a JS dev. It's a very fun runtime to poke around... I'd almost prefer all apps to live within the heavily sandboxed browser. It's the best effort made toward portability and it's been a community effort. :x
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#9> Sprintf(...) Seriously? Why would anyone use sprintf() in 2013 without knowing the size of all possible arguments.
The article does touch on this...
Re: Memory management in C programs (2014)
#10As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day. For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me. That must be…
As a non-C user, C was always too forboding. I wrote a bit of it, and read K&R, but places like HN bang into your head that you'll likely make a horrible screw-up writing C, your code won't be secure, and it's better not to bother. Maybe I should spend some more time with it.