What's the best way to learn C? Any good modern book recommendations, or sites?
There's a second edition of the legendary K&R book¹ to get you started.
¹https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernig...
I stopped everything and started writing C again
301–310 of 475 posts
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think C was successful. It still is! What other language from the 70s is still under the top 5 languages? https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
SQL, Lisp.
SQL absolutely. Lisp is not anywhere near top 5, though. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
He's not making a comment about everyone , it's a specific comment about how often long time C programmers make basic mistakes after a million SLOC or so. In this instance Walter is correct - the mistakes he listed are very rarely made by experienced C programmers, just as ballet dancers rarely trip over their own feet walking down a pavement. The problem of those errors being commonplace in those that are barely fiv…
> just as ballet dancers rarely trip over their own feet walking down a pavement
What about about walking down a busy construction site? The most charitable and correct interpretation I can think of is "I'm a professional. Seatbelts and OSHA destroy my productivity."
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
I Really want to use Rust. But Rust has so many std functions that kind of abstracting how does it work under the hood For Ex: I still has no idea what clone() does, how does it interact with memory, on heap or stack , does it create a new instance, or just modify metadata of that object. Sometime creating a new instance is a big no-no because it takes a lot of memory. Same thing with "ownership transfer", is variabl…
What is your current language of choice, both C and C++ have the same problems as what you just described. Regarding ownership transfer it is even worse in C, what if you forget, after moving an object out of a variable, to set that variable to NULL, then free that variable, that's a use after free. At least in C++ you have move semantics although it is still error prone. In rust it's a compiler error. Copy and Clone…
Well, i dont use C++ much(i'm FW engineer, most of my stuff is in C).
The std in C is simple and explicit. For Ex: I can make an educated guess how memcpy() work by looking at its signature. It takes pointer to src and destination, and size, so i can guess it does not allocate any new memory(or if it has, it has to be some kind of optimization reason).
Another example is strstr(), it returns pointer to a piece of memory i provided to it, so i can safely do some pointer math with the return value.
It's true that i do not spend much time in Rust, so maybe i'm missing some fundamental things. I guess my mistake is trying to apply my knowledge in C to rust.
But still, it's kind of irritating now knowing (or guessing) how does function work just by looking at at its signature.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Those would be the difficult questions one would be forced to confront ahead of time with this technique. That's not a bug; it's a feature! Similar to what Ada does with access types which are lexically scoped.
The problem is that regardless of the amount of confrontation it does not have an answer for any infinite run time event-loop based program, other than "allocate all of memory into a buffer at startup and implement your own memory manager inside that".
Which just punts the problem from a mature and tested runtime library to some code you just make up on the spot.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#306I started programming with C a long time ago, and even now, every few months, I dream of going back to those roots. It was so simple. You wrote code, you knew roughly which instructions it translated to, and there you went! Then I try actually going through the motions of writing a production-grade application in C and I realise why I left it behind all those years ago. There's just so much stuff one has to do on one…
> no support from the computer
There are a lot of things that are so USEFUL, but maddening.
C is one. make is another.
They serve a really valid purpose, but because they are stable, they have also not evolved at all.
from your ada example, I love package and package body. C has function prototypes but it is almost meaningless.
everyone seems to think C++ is C grown=up, but I don't really like it. It is more like systemd. People accept it but don't love it.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really depends what you want to do. All that security in Rust is only needed if there is a danger of hacks compromising the system. The moment you start building something that's not exposed to the internet and hacking it has no implications, C beats it due to simplicity and speed of development .
C might beat Rust at simplicity and speed of development (don't know, I never developed in Rust) but I remember why I stopped developing in C about 30 years ago: the hundreds of inevitably bug ridden lines of C to build a CGI back then (malloc, free, strcpy, etc) vs little more than string slicing and "string" . "concatenation" in Perl and forget about everything else. That could have been Python (which I didn't know…
String handling is certainly one of C's main weaknesses
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating. Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. And add `-lgc` to linking. It's already there on most systems these days, lots of things use it. You can add some efficiency by `GC_free()` in cases where you're really really sure, but it's entirely optional, and adds a lot of danger. Using `GC_malloc_atomic()` also adds eff…
> Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating. > Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. Even more liberating (and dangerous!): do not even malloc, just use variable length-arrays: void f(float *y, float *x, int n) { float t[n]; // temporary array, destroyed at the end of scope ... } This style forces you to alloc the memory at the outermost scope where it is…
C with dynamic arrays and classes? Object pascal says hello…
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#309I fully understand that sentiment. For several years now, I have also felt the strong urge to develop something in pure C. My main language is C++, but I have noticed over and over again that I really enjoy using the old C libraries - the interfaces are just so simple and basic, there is no fluff. When I develop methods in pure C, I always enjoy that I can concentrate 100% on algorithmic aspects instead of architectu…
Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating. Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. And add `-lgc` to linking. It's already there on most systems these days, lots of things use it. You can add some efficiency by `GC_free()` in cases where you're really really sure, but it's entirely optional, and adds a lot of danger. Using `GC_malloc_atomic()` also adds eff…
>Try doing C with a garbage collector ... it's very liberating.
Doing that means that I lose some speed and I will have to wait for GC collection.
Then why shouldn't I use C# which is more productive and has libraries and frameworks that comes with batteries included that help me build functionality fast.
I thought that one of the main points of using C is speed.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#310I fully understand that sentiment. For several years now, I have also felt the strong urge to develop something in pure C. My main language is C++, but I have noticed over and over again that I really enjoy using the old C libraries - the interfaces are just so simple and basic, there is no fluff. When I develop methods in pure C, I always enjoy that I can concentrate 100% on algorithmic aspects instead of architectu…
I like the idea of using C++ as C. I began disliking OOP, inheritance and encapsulation, heavy usage of GoF patterns and even SOLID. They promise easy to understand, easy to follow, easy to maintain, easy to change, easy to extend code and a good productivity but the effect is contrary, most of the times.
I like functional programming and procedural programming. Fits better to how I think about code. Code is something that takes data and spits data. Code shouldn't be forced into emulating some real life concepts.