31–40 of 158 posts
s/C/NIM Why don’t more folks use NIM for web development. Seems like the perfect blend of performance, ergonomics and productivity.
I am sure the D and V guys are asking themselves the same question.
It seems pretty crazy to write web-facing apps in C, with no memory safety at all. (They do have "pledge" but even in the most restricted case, this still leaves full access to database)
Though the majority of running web servers, load balancers, protocol proxies like php-fpm, etc, are probably written in C :)
People love to talk all sorts of trash on this kind of stack but it's really quite solid for what it does. If anyone was ever curious what a sizeable codebase in this kind of code would even look like, check out the source code for undeadly.org [1]. Yeah these people may be crazy but they're also OpenBSD developers and we really love to see what we can get away with using nothing other than what's available in the ba…
pkg_add sqlite3
Can't get away.
I'd be fine with this, even totally on-board, if C weren't so awful with respect to text. You don't even have to worry too much about free()ing your malloc()s if you design around short-lived processes. But this is just asking for security concerns among the tangled web of string and input processing your bespoke C routines are likely to develop into. Pair it with a better, more modern, and safer native-compiled lang…
> Pair it with a better, more modern, and safer native-compiled language and get the same effect. Zig, Nim, Go, hell even Carp. I love how trollish it is not to talk about Rust in that context.
I’d like to love man pages but - I feel that they are linux only. On my MacOS system I can’t rely on man x being the man page for the right version of x. I know that in principle there are environment variables that make sure i’m getting the gnu core utils version or the base homebrew version rather than the system BSD version, but it’s too many moving parts. Furthermore even if I get it right, I can’t expect people…
But isn't that an issue with macOS, not an issue with man pages?
I'd be fine with this, even totally on-board, if C weren't so awful with respect to text. You don't even have to worry too much about free()ing your malloc()s if you design around short-lived processes. But this is just asking for security concerns among the tangled web of string and input processing your bespoke C routines are likely to develop into. Pair it with a better, more modern, and safer native-compiled lang…
I just wish there were better tools for navigating C codebases. There’s been more than one time where I’m in some large auto tools based project trying to figure something out and there’s a call out to some dependencies I have no idea of. Also many of the projects lack and sort of documentation or source code commenting. These aren’t someones pet project either. One of them was from a notable name in the open source…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you ever choose C anymore? The killer feature of C++ is “you don’t pay for what you don’t use”. There’s virtually no reason ever not to use C++.
Isn’t “C++ is too complex for me” a decent reason?
But C is non of them. Pointers are more complex in C than in C++ (pointer provenance). Casts are more complicated in C than in C++, as C++ named casts are less powerful and therefore give you less opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot. Strings (I'd guess quite important part of web programming) are a minefield in C, and they are so much better in C++. Resource management, memory ownership, object lifetimes. All very hairy in C++, all a good reason to not use C++. but also reasons to not use C. Types are a mess in C++. C is even weaker typed, making it worse.
If you like procedural programming and dislike the complexities of C++, i suggest you write C++ without member functions, without inheritance and compiler disabled exceptions. It will feel similar, but it will be better. I suggest using a c++ compiler to write C with enum classes, std::span, either a typed std::span wrapper for malloc or std::vector, std::string, std::string_view,using, std::variant, std::unique_ptr, std::fmt, std::optional, templates, std::vector for your types, in that order. And don't use C style var-args and C style enums, C style unions. You can have very C-Like code, that is way less complex than C.
Hello world apps don't mean much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you ever choose C anymore? The killer feature of C++ is “you don’t pay for what you don’t use”. There’s virtually no reason ever not to use C++.
Isn’t “C++ is too complex for me” a decent reason?