Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

cforall.uwaterloo.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 143 posts

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#101

Post by olodus »

skrebbel wrote: post #13

Obligatory name-drop: Zig is an awesome low level programming language targeting the same space as C and CForAll. It isn't at all compatible with C on the source level like CForAll is, but it does make it super easy to interop with C, because it can include .h files. That means it lets you move projects from C to Zig file-by-file. Because Zig benefits from decades of insights about how C could've been better, it has…

Have been doing this years Advent of Code in Zig because I've been exited to try it out for a long time now. After over the first bumps I really like how it keeps most of the simpleness and clearness of C while fixing a lot of annoyances. The really simple to grok but still incredibly powerful comptime idea is a good example. It adds generics and a much saner macro language without making something too complex or hard to understand. I still have great hopes for languages like Rust in the system programming area because of the guarantees it gives at compile time but when it comes to minimalism zig feels like a much better choice. I would really like the Std lib to be better documented though but I hear that is in the works.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#102

Post by pjmlp »

remix2000 wrote: post #67

I’m very surprised that no one here has mentioned the Cyclone language[0] yet. It seems to me that it tried to address the same niche as C-for-all. [0] https://cyclone.thelanguage.org

The project died, but its region-based memory management influenced a couple of new languages.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#103

Post by olodus »

banachtarski wrote: post #52
skrebbel wrote: post #13

Obligatory name-drop: Zig is an awesome low level programming language targeting the same space as C and CForAll. It isn't at all compatible with C on the source level like CForAll is, but it does make it super easy to interop with C, because it can include .h files. That means it lets you move projects from C to Zig file-by-file. Because Zig benefits from decades of insights about how C could've been better, it has…

Zig is, however, unsuitable for interactive media or scientific computing due to the unfortunate lack of operator overloading (which is touted as a "feature"), rendering it less general purpose than I'd like. Other aspects of its design look good however.

Im not super sure what specific use case you are after but are you sure you can't do this in some ways with comptime generics? I have to be able to do most generic-like stuff with comptime (though I sometimes have to change the implementation a bit). I also really value how clear the lack of overloading makes the language. This way of clearly being able to follow the control flow is one of the things I like that they kept from C.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#104

Post by crazypython »

cain wrote: post #100

I was excited to read about this. An upgraded C would be nice. Unfortunately, after the homepage, this seems disastrously opposed to anything resembling a "better" C. The features page feels extremely painful to read. It took me at least two minutes to even begin to make sense of the first section: "Declarations", then an explanation of Tuple, immediately followed by: int i; double x, y; int f( int, int, int ); f( 2,…

Take a look at D. Some of D's features (such as alias this and mixin templates) may seem strange, but they come from decades of experience with C++ features- Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu, two C++ pioneers, are among D's foremost advocates. WB made the first end-to-end C++ compiler, and AA wrote Modern C++ Design. GCC 9 now supports D.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#105

Post by crazypython »

gambiting wrote: post #15
dvt wrote: post #7

I'm sure a lot of very smart people are working on this, and I don't want to detract from their dedication, but man this language looks like a mess. And in no small part because it wants to be backwards compatible with C (the reasoning is unconvincing -- why not just use C++?). In the age of Go and Rust, which already have a hard time finding niches, I don't really think there's any room for a language like this. And…

I don't know, I work in the games industry and we're currently building a small project that's probably 95% C(the only C++ we have is for one library that has to have a C++ wrapper). It's just.....we don't need the C++ features, the compilation times are instant(last project I worked on was a large AAA game in C++ and compiling it from scratch was about 40-50 minutes on a single workstation), and pretty much all libs…

Y'all should try D! D compiles really fast-- the D reference compiler can compile itself, the standard library, and the codegen backend in less than 5 seconds, on a single laptop core. It uses a streaming architecture to achieve this. It runs fast because it is supported by both GCC and LLVM. One of its guiding principles is the thing that looks like C works like C-- all members of a file public by default, for example.

Some experimental compiler builds (Calypso) can compile D for use with C++ libraries as complex as Qt.

You can start porting your D project to C by using DPP- it allows you to #include C headers within D- and use macros. Putting "extern(C):" at the top of your file let's you interoperate between C and D.

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote Modern C++ Design, and is the co-captain of D. The captain of D created the first end-to-end C++ compiler.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#106

Post by dunkelheit »

banachtarski wrote: post #52
skrebbel wrote: post #13

Obligatory name-drop: Zig is an awesome low level programming language targeting the same space as C and CForAll. It isn't at all compatible with C on the source level like CForAll is, but it does make it super easy to interop with C, because it can include .h files. That means it lets you move projects from C to Zig file-by-file. Because Zig benefits from decades of insights about how C could've been better, it has…

Zig is, however, unsuitable for interactive media or scientific computing due to the unfortunate lack of operator overloading (which is touted as a "feature"), rendering it less general purpose than I'd like. Other aspects of its design look good however.

It is obvious how operator overloading makes scientific computing easier but what about interactive media? Can you clarify?

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#108

Post by notacoward »

I like the general idea, but the result seems just as full of garbage as C++. Remember the first time you saw a lambda declaration in C++? That sequence of familiar-seeming characters to mean something totally different probably threw you a bit. I know it did me. C-for-all's constructor/destructor syntax reminds me of that.

  // bonus doc bug: "with" hasn't been introduced yet
  void ^?{}( VLA & vla ) with ( vla ) { // destructor
The syntax for redefining ++ or -- (which already seems spurious) is even more opaque.

  S & ?+=?( S & op, one_t )
Other features, like left-to-right declaration syntax and postfix function calls, seem to have no use except to make one programmer's code harder for another programmer to understand. Then they throw in the rest of the kitchen sink, with all of C++'s overloading and polymorphism and inheritance plus both kinds and traits. The result is even more complex and even more surprising (in a bad way) to actual C programmers than C++ or for that matter APL. If not for the absence of templates, I'd say Cforall's complexity is a strict superset of C++'s.

If I wanted a direct C replacement with minimal improvements, I'd try D or Zig. If I wanted a systems programming language that had more differences but fewer surprises, Rust or Nim. The last thing I'd want is something that's both more baroque (rococo?) and less known than any of those.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#109

Post by thechao »

pcr910303 wrote: post #20

I really don’t need an extended-C with productivity features... as that’s one of the defining points of C(the language is small). Fixing the warts (like different behavior between the overflow of unsigned ints & signed inta) would have been fine. I personally want a better stdlib for C; fix the defiancies of , removing the global locales (changing function behaviors according to LC_* was a really, really bad idea[0])…

Right? I keep thinking that the first place to start on a better C is to ask what needs be removed — not added. Once the “bad parts” are removed, what ergonomic features need be added back in?

For starters: implicit coercion is out; weak type aliasing is out; automatic binary serialization of aggregate types is out; etc.

Re: C-for-all: Extending C with modern safety and productivity features

#110

Post by jacquesm »

dnautics wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that is an interesting combo.

if that combination is interesting to you, this is what I'm working on (on the side from my main job): https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler

Oh, nice, I will definitely try that. Nifs in C are an eyesore and a risk, having more language options there is good and a clean integration like this is even better.
Post reply on HN