Why Aren't There C Conferences? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#161

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #89

threeseed wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Apple developers are regularly seen at other conferences and events. It's just a PITA to get Legal approval to give presentations.

They do? I didn't think they'd be holding workshops and answering SDK questions at other conferences. Certainly Apple devs attend conferences like any other engineer.

They do, occasionally. At least, there are a couple where Apple engineers have given talks.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#162

Post by davrosthedalek » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

nineteen999 wrote: post #136

Kaveren wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are none. Standard Rust is great for game development, the infrastructure just isn't there right now, but I think if you were to write a new game engine or operating system from scratch, Rust would be the first candidate language to do so in.

The game engine segment is much like the operating system segment - the size, momentum/inertia of the incumbents (ie. UE4, Unity as an analog to Linux, Windows etc) make it rather difficult for new entrants, especially for ones written in languages that are not as popular as C or C++ (eg. Rust). It's simply too hard right now to find enough programmers proficient in Rust who could assemble a competing product, IMHO.

Honest question: for these performance critical things, how good are compilers for Rust, Go etc. compared to modern C/C++ compilers? One reason that Fortran is still so heavily used in HPC is the quality of the compilers.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#163

Post by wikwocket » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #19

Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors at the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on "Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning", but there are no conferences about hammers. Don't forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they'll have hammer vendors, too. I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sens…

I get your analogy, but I think there are tons of hammer conferences.

There are conferences for most any language with wide adoption. There's also a Slack conference (not "TeamChatConf," but a "Slack Frontiers"). There's a GitHub conf (not "OpenSourceDevCon," but "GitHub Universe"). There is a Datadog conference, and so on and so on.

Maybe C just doesn't have one big company, or an ecosystem of smaller ones, that stand to benefit from gathering a bunch of C devs in one place.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#164

Post by alaxsxaq » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

It is an interesting thought. I went to one of the early OSCON conferences in Portland and it was pretty cool to have the Ruby (Matts), Python (Guido), and Perl (Larry Wall) people all at the same conference. I was a budding Python programmer, but sat through sessions on the other languages to get a feel for what they offered.

That was a great conference - amazing attendees spending the evening hanging out around the conference center hacking code and an amazing diversity of presenters.

I go to OSCON often and that atmosphere has never been repeated as things have splintered off into language/application area specific conferences. Something's been lost - at least for the casual or beginner programmer.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#165

Post by lgleason » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

Svoka wrote: post #13

Lets be honest: conferences exist to waste time. Nothing productive gets done on conferences and best thing you can take our from them is to socialize with like-minded people.

For a while we had some quality conferences around topics such as Ruby, Javascript etc. with great technical talks that were open to anybody who had an interest and wanted to attend. These days many, if not most of them are thinly veiled political/social justice action get togethers that actively ban people who do not share in the ideology.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#166

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

stochastic_monk wrote: post #77

ddingus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one way non-standard extensions become standard.

For example, the [[maybe_unused]] and similar annotations in C++17 grew out of gcc builtins.

Of course, C++ is much more aggressive in stealing popular features from the community, especially Boost.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#167

Post by embedder » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

johan_larson wrote: post #52

Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.

The entire embedded systems industry revolves around C and C++. This includes the automotive industry, aeronautics, robotics, medical devices, space, much of IoT, appliances, countless defense projects, infrastructure, etc. And even in a traditional computing environment, many projects requiring high performance and portability are still being written in C or C++, such as games and high-fidelity modeling/simulation.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#168

Post by klodolph » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #122

Not sure about conferences, but what bothers me is that there is no single acknowledged discussion group about C, after Google destroyed newsgroups and comp.lang.c with it. There should be a very popular Reddit sub about it, but yet Reddit is not enough standard among developers, unfortunately. Right now there is: * https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/c_language/

I'm unsure what you mean by Google "destroying" newsgroups. Newsgroups were decentralized to begin with, the fact that Google purchased Deja News and then didn't... I don't know, turn it into a Reddit-equivalent or something doesn't surprise me. You can still use Google Groups as a Usenet gateway and there are still other Usenet gateways around, although the offerings are getting a bit more scarce and it's no longer a standard part of your ISP's package.

Whenever I look at places like comp.lang.c (which still exists) I remember the bad Usenet experiences I had in the 1990s. It's certainly not worse than it was, in my mind. If anything killed newsgroups, it was Slashdot / Reddit / Stack Overflow and the like.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#169

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #24

oneplane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with that is there is no single C community. Imagine trying to get ANSI C, Win32 C, GNU C and every flavor of embedded C together.

Seriously, check out TI's C++ support for their DSPs. Last time I checked they were so behind the curve they didn't even support templates.

That might because they are targeting Embedded C++, which explicitly eschews these features.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#170

Post by lispm » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #158

lispm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other implementations have parts of the runtime written in Assembler, Lisp, Java, ... A bunch of languages can be used to write a Lisp runtime.

The ones based on Java run on the JVM, which is always written in C :) The ones written in Lisp, well, at the bottom it's C again. I haven't seen a popular lisp yet with a meaningful amount of assembly in lieu of C.

> The ones written in Lisp

I have some of these exotic Lisp Machines from the 80s which run no C code by default and where the C compiler is optional and written in Lisp. ;-) Obviously exotic and outdated. An alternate world.

> I haven't seen a popular lisp yet with a meaningful amount of assembly in lieu of C.

https://github.com/Clozure/ccl/tree/master/level-0/ARM

And, yes, the assembler is written in Lisp, too.