151–160 of 536 posts
But look at how simple the language was in the beginning. A handful of concepts, strung together. Incremental changes; not all were deemed best in hindsight.
You can fit what is going on in 16K in your head.
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Because everything speaks C. If you write a library in C, it can be easily exposed to a variety of high-level languages and platforms. You might argue this is more a property of the C ABI than of C itself, but unless the project is large enough that it's worth doing it in C++ or Rust instead, it's still a very reasonable choice. Also not everything is web. Sure, if you're writing API endpoints in C you're just shooti…
I believe that with the arrival of ChatGPT and similar tools, writing code in C will become as easy as in any other language. The AI tools know how to generate good C code, and C is fast by itself. I believe we'll see a lot more code written in C now that we have new tools to analyze C code.
Are you sure about that? ChatGPT doesn't understand C. It wouldn't even have enough context to reason about UB even if it understood UB.
People who still write C, honest question: Why? C is full of quirks. From cryptic "undefined behaviors" to a type system that isn't really a type system (more like "size hints for the compiler"), the language doesn't feel easy to use/debug. Add to this CPP macros, a universally recognized bad idea, a clunky import system, and lack of a single reference implementation of the compiler/libC, and you have a language that…
1. It gives me a lot of control over how the program works, which lets me create programs that work faster and use less memory than would be possible in most other languages. 2. Relatedly, it's more explicit than almost any other language. If a line of code doesn't look like a function call, it's not calling anything. There is no hidden control flow. These statements are not true in languages which support operator o…
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> It gives me a lot of control over how the program works, which lets me create programs that work faster and use less memory than would be possible in most other languages. While it is true to a degree, I would also add that due to its low level of expressivity, you often have to introduce less efficient solutions simply because language deficiencies. Things like small string optimizations in C++ are simply not poss…
> due to its low level of expressivity, you often have to introduce less efficient solutions simply because language deficiencies. Things like small string optimizations in C++ are simply not possible in C. You don't have to use an inefficient solution. You can always roll your own optimized solution or use a library. I agree that C++ has some nice string optimizations built into the standard library, but it's not ob…
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> due to its low level of expressivity, you often have to introduce less efficient solutions simply because language deficiencies. Things like small string optimizations in C++ are simply not possible in C. You don't have to use an inefficient solution. You can always roll your own optimized solution or use a library. I agree that C++ has some nice string optimizations built into the standard library, but it's not ob…
> You don't have to use an inefficient solution. You can always roll your own optimized solution or use a library That’s not true. You for example can’t write a generic, efficient vector implementation in C - the language itself can’t do that. You either have to copy paste the same code for different sizes, or make use of some monstrous hack of a macro. Instead projects use hacks like conventionally placing the next/…
Yeah, I was thinking about your string example when I wrote that. For high performance numerical code, I can see the advantages in using C++.
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1. It gives me a lot of control over how the program works, which lets me create programs that work faster and use less memory than would be possible in most other languages. 2. Relatedly, it's more explicit than almost any other language. If a line of code doesn't look like a function call, it's not calling anything. There is no hidden control flow. These statements are not true in languages which support operator o…
> If a line of code doesn't look like a function call, it's not calling anything. Why is that important to you?
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Because everything speaks C. If you write a library in C, it can be easily exposed to a variety of high-level languages and platforms. You might argue this is more a property of the C ABI than of C itself, but unless the project is large enough that it's worth doing it in C++ or Rust instead, it's still a very reasonable choice. Also not everything is web. Sure, if you're writing API endpoints in C you're just shooti…
I believe that with the arrival of ChatGPT and similar tools, writing code in C will become as easy as in any other language. The AI tools know how to generate good C code, and C is fast by itself. I believe we'll see a lot more code written in C now that we have new tools to analyze C code.
I look forward to a raft of CVEs over the next decade where ChatGPT is a root cause...
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> The C representation of memory (and all the pointer arithmetic) is not a real representation of your hardware, and this too is an abstraction. By and large memory is a contiguous array and the C representation closely matches what is actually happening, so I am curious about which platforms you have worked on.
> the C representation closely matches what is actually happening It really doesn't, though. Although your CPU might present system RAM as one contiguous array of bytes to your program, the C compiler follows different rules – see strict aliasing and other pointer dereference rules. For example, the following is Undefined Behavior and your C compiler may or may not generate the assembly you expect: int x = *(int *)0x…
And every sane implementation does what everyone expects because its how memory mapped IO works (but you probably want a volatile in there and maybe a compiler or memory barrier as well depending on what the hardware guarantees about the access patterns for that particular range of addresses)
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> It gives me a lot of control over how the program works, which lets me create programs that work faster and use less memory than would be possible in most other languages. While it is true to a degree, I would also add that due to its low level of expressivity, you often have to introduce less efficient solutions simply because language deficiencies. Things like small string optimizations in C++ are simply not poss…
People who know how to use C rarely if ever have problems with undefined behavior. I particularly have written a huge amount of C code and my bugs have never been related to undefined behavior. This is an idea that has been spread to make people even more afraid of using C/C++. While there is a possibility of finding these problems, in practice it is almost a non-issue.
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Why wouldn't you use assembly for programming a microcontroller? Sure, it's not a great language for web backends but microcontrollers are where it shines. /s Because as the OP states, it's an objectively (pun intended) terribly abstracted language. There is nothing 100% predictable about C except that you'll eventually get screwed because you didn't account for some random obscure thing that should never have even b…
> There is nothing predictable about C except that you’ll eventually get screwed … This has been the exact opposite of my experience. I’ve been writing C for 10 years and have yet to find a piece of code where I was surprised at what it did. That’s one thing I love about C, is it is entirely predictable. If it isn’t, my code is wrong. The language is rigorously specified. It is not hard to avoid undefined behavior. C…
The thing is, I'm not convinced avoiding UB is easy. E.g. what's the behavior of the following code?
int16_t a = 20000;
int16_t b = a + a;