201–210 of 383 posts
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I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.
To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.
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The installation scripts are written in bash. That's the important bit. Just because the compiler, standard library, etc, isn't - doesn't mean it's not based on bash. You cannot use SBCL without a bash shell. /s Of course you can use SBCL without a C compiler - you simply use a precompiled version. You can't build SBCL without a C compiler.
Shell scripts just slap commands together. You could just be a human interpreter reading the source and get the job done. C is a much more fundamental requirement of SBCL. Much more so than in the way SCBL depends on Python, for example (e.g. it doesn't). Listen, I get that in the ivory tower of lisp you don't like looking at the little C bricks at the bottom, but the fact is that they exist and C is a hugely importa…
Still, I find it hard to put an equality sign between "X has a runtime written in C" and "X is written in C".
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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.
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I think this is a very debatable claim. MSVC is an insignificant compiler in a lot of industries. In something like scientific computing, everything is written with gcc, clang and Intel on mind. Sure, you'll find some companies still using MSVC, but it's not industry standard any more and it's very unclear how an insignificant, outdated compiler can stop the progress of world's most fundamental programming language.
C's strength is being the lingua franca of the bottom of the stack. I can believe that there are some applications that know a priori that they will never need to be portable to MSVC. But for any foundational open-source library, closing the door to MSVC is a high price to pay. Someone, sooner or later, will want to use the code on Windows. If you are zlib, ffmpeg, freetype, Lua, LuaJIT, sqlite, libpng, c-ares, OpenS…
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Sure, why would anyone want to waste time lifting their nose briefly from their employer's grindstone to get exposed to new colleagues, new ideas, and new business opportunities?
They are a waste of your employer’s time. For you they’re great, you’re still getting paid, but don’t have to work.
In my view, as someone who contributes to free software as my job (though the rest of this is somewhat related to proprietary developers too), conferences are a great opportunity to have IRL discussions over current development topics as well as meet people from other free software communities (who might work for proprietary software companies). And arguably that is getting work done (and I have written patches side-by-side with someone while at conferences quite a few times).
Having connections in your field, as well as being well-known by your field (perhaps by submitting talks to conferences) is very useful for both you and your employer. In most cases, a lack of conference attendance by a company is seen as a "bad smell" in some communities (it indicates that they don't have an interest in the community around something they use -- maybe because they think that interacting with their community through conferences is a waste of time). It also potentially gives you access to more recruits, because people looking for work often attend conferences to expand their connections.
Not to mention that most medium-and-larger companies can spare a few thousand dollars a few times a year to send their employees to a conference to act as both a marketing tool and as a form of training at conferences. I'd bet that medium-sized companies spend more on stationary and tea+coffee supplies yearly.
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.
Tons. Heck, I'm working on one now. Nothing really matches the performance or wealth of libraries as C/C++. Rust comes close but even then for something like a linear algebra library the ability to use CPU intrinsics, etc. makes a huge difference.
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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.
As we all know benchmarks need to be taken with a handful of salt since the publisher often has a vested interest in pushing one point of view or another for monetary or whatever reasons.
My personal view is that until we see a AAA game engine or mainstream operating system that is able to run a comparable suite of software to Windows/Linux written in Rust or Go, we won't really know if these languages (or implementations thereof) are going to be suitable for these things.
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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.
I could see it happening in the future. There's has been a mini resurgence in C from (normally high level language) programmers who are getting sick of web development and are interested in data oriented design. Conference benefits could be: Pushing the C standard. C11 is barely supported. Discussing new standards in a forum other than mailing lists. Did you guys know there is already a C17 standard? Letting old C de…
Nowadays people want to write in Go, Rust, Swift, etc.
Good question, but a majority of this post is links to cppcon videos. (I do appreciate the shoutout to LLVM). I think the C community: * Should have a C conference. * Actually be more aggressive in adding features to the language. For example, there are some really great GNU C extensions that are long overdue be added to the standard. Compiler vendors should work with the standards bodies more, rather than shipping l…
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.
The main problem with that is there is no single JavaScript/HTML community.
Imagine trying to get IE, Netscape, Opera and every flavor of embedded HTML viewer together.