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I stopped everything and started writing C again

kmx.io

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Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#281

Post by teleforce »

> Garbage collectors suck, and all my Common Lisp projects have very limited applications just because of the garbage collector.

If only a very tiny fraction of the resources effort, research, time, money etc of all ML/AI funds are directed for the best design of high performance GC, it will make a software world a much better place. The fact that we have a very few books dedicated on GC design and thousands of books now dedicated on AI/ML, it is quite telling.

For real-world example and analogy, automotive industry dedicated their resources on the best design of high performance automatic transmission and now it has a faster auto transmission than manual for rally and racing. For normal driving auto is what the default and available now, most of the cars do not sell in manual transmission version.

> Linux is written in C, OpenBSD is written in C, GTK+ is object-oriented pure C, GNOME is written in C. Most of the Linux desktop apps are actually written in plain old C. So why try harder ? I know C

C is the lingua-franca of all other programming languages including Python, Julia, Rust, etc. Period.

D language has already bite the bullet and made C built-in by natively supporting it. Genius.

D language also has GC by default for more sane and intuitive programming, it's your call. It also one of the fastest compilation time and execution time languages in existence.

From the KC3 language website, "KC3 is a programming language with meta-programmation and a graph database embedded into the language."

Why you want to have a graph database embedded into the language? Just support associative array built-in since it has been proven to be the basis of all common data representations of spreadsheet, SQL, NoSQL, matrices, Graph database, etc.

[1] Associative Array Model of SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL Databases:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.05797

[2] Mathematics of Big Data: Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da...

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#282

Post by thodg »

tartoran wrote: post #232
BuckRogers wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very interesting. You have quite the resume too. While I've dabbled in nearly everything, I'm a day to day pro C# developer and I absolutely love it. I've never been upset or had a complaint. If I were forced off for some reason, I'd just go to Typescript. I can't imagine using C. Perhaps with some form of AI valgrind. The problems C solved are just not relevant any longer, and it remains entrenched in 2025.…

It depends on problem domain. If you're writing kernel level code or device drivers you wouldn't use C# or typescript.

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Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#283

Post by thodg »

teleforce wrote: post #281

> Garbage collectors suck, and all my Common Lisp projects have very limited applications just because of the garbage collector. If only a very tiny fraction of the resources effort, research, time, money etc of all ML/AI funds are directed for the best design of high performance GC, it will make a software world a much better place. The fact that we have a very few books dedicated on GC design and thousands of books…

[dead]

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#284

Post by thodg »

duskwuff wrote: post #269
kqr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I really liked this idea, but then I realised the size of stack frames is quite limited, isn't it? So this would work for small data but perhaps not big data.

It isn't a practical pattern for anything beyond the most trivial applications. Consider what this would look like if you tried to write a text editor, for instance - if a user types a new line of text, where is the memory for that allocated?

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Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#285

Post by cryptonector »

> It was supposed to be a short mission I thought I could learn Common Lisp in ten days and hack a quick server management protocol. I ended up writing throw-away Common Lisp code that generated C for a fully-fledged ASN.1 parser and query system for a custom Common Lisp to C SNMP server.

I believe it. And I'd love to see it and hack on it, if it were open source.

This whole kc3 thing looks pretty interesting to me. I agree with the premise. It's really just another super-C that's not C++, but that's a pretty good idea for a lot of things because the C ABI is just so omnipresent.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#286

Post by bcrosby95 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #272
naasking wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I don’t know which good parts of C++ they kept. comptime is a better version of C++ templates.

I really wish that were true but it isn’t. Modern C++ templates/constexpr are much more powerful and expressive than any Zig comptime equivalent. The power and expressiveness of the C++ compile-time capabilities are the one thing I strongly miss when using other languages. The amount of safety and conciseness those features enable makes not having them feel like a giant step backward. Honestly, if another systems lan…

If it looks anything like what I read in "Modern C++ Design" 20+ years ago then I'll pass. That book made me realize the language wasn't for me anymore.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#287

Post by p_ing »

tartoran wrote: post #232
BuckRogers wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very interesting. You have quite the resume too. While I've dabbled in nearly everything, I'm a day to day pro C# developer and I absolutely love it. I've never been upset or had a complaint. If I were forced off for some reason, I'd just go to Typescript. I can't imagine using C. Perhaps with some form of AI valgrind. The problems C solved are just not relevant any longer, and it remains entrenched in 2025.…

It depends on problem domain. If you're writing kernel level code or device drivers you wouldn't use C# or typescript.

There are at least a few kernels, bootloaders, and device drivers written in C# out there… granted for hobby/research.

https://github.com/Michael-K-GH/RoseOS

https://vollragm.github.io/posts/kernelsharp/

https://www.gocosmos.org

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity... (asm, C, C++, largely C# (Sing#))

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#288

Post by otterley »

kelnos wrote: post #231
WalterBright wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Memory leaks, NULL pointer dereferences, use-after-free I suffered writing those for many years. I finally simply learned not to do them anymore. Sort of like there's a grain of sand on the bottom of my foot and the skin just sort of entombed it in a callous.

I've seen you make these kinds of comments before on other articles. Please stop. Not everyone is perfect and can forevermore avoid making any mistakes. I strongly suspect your opinion of your skill here is overinflated. Even if it isn't, and you really are that good, everyone cannot be in the top 0.00001% of all programmers out there, so your suggestion to "simply" learn not to make mistakes is useless. This all jus…

I think a more charitable interpretation of what he said was, "after sufficient practice, I became good enough to start avoiding those pitfalls."

It's not all that different from learning any challenging task. I can't skateboard to save my life, but the fact that people can do it well is both admirable and the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice.

Skilled people can sometimes forget how long it took to learn their talent, and can occasionally come off as though the act is easy as a result. Don't take it too harshly.

Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again

#290

Post by otterley »

imtringued wrote: post #77
anymouse123456 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is not free of trade offs and you're not helping the cause the way you think you are. Just a few off the top: - Rust is a much more complex language than C - Rust has a much, much slower compiler than pretty much any language out there - Rust takes most people far longer to "feel" productive - Rust applications are sometimes (often?) slower than comparable C applications - Rust applications are sometimes (often?…

That's fair, but to me what drags C and C++ really down for me is the difficulty in building them. As I get older I just want to write the code and not mess with makefiles or CMake. I don't want starting a new project to be a "commitment" that requires me to sit down for two hours. For me Rust isn't really competing against unchecked C. It's competing against Java and boy does the JVM suck outside of server deploymen…

> boy does the JVM suck outside of server deployments

Does it? Why? Is it significantly worse than any other language that needs a runtime like Python or Node?

`java -jar foo.jar MainClass` doesn't seem all that bad. Plus you can wrap it in a trivial shell script if you want.

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