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Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

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Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#91

Post by dataflow »

sesm wrote: post #77
762236 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want to run a garbage collector and deal with it's performance penalties?

IDK about Fil-C, but in Java garbage collector actually speeds up memory management compared to C++ if you measure the throughput. The cost of this is increased worst-case latency. A CLI tool (which most POSIX tools are) would pick throughput over latency any time.

> in Java garbage collector actually speeds up memory management compared to C++ if you measure the throughput

If I had a dollar for every time somebody repeated this without real-world benchmarks to back it up...

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#92

Post by foobarian »

khaledh wrote: post #32

The problem with macro-laden C is that your code becomes foreign and opaque to others. You're building a new mini-language layer on top of the base language that only your codebase uses. This has been my experience with many large C projects: I see tons of macros used all over the place and I have no idea what they do unless I hunt down and understand each one of them.

Obligatory link to Bourne Shell source code. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh...

Discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22191790

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#93

Post by greenavocado »

pjmlp wrote: post #22
keyle wrote: post #5

I don't understand this passion for turning C into what it's not... Just don't use C for sending astronauts in space. Simple. C wasn't designed to be safe, it was designed so you don't have to write in assembly. Just a quick look through this and it just shows one thing: someone else's walled garden of hell.

Some C devs will make all kinds of crazy efforts only not to use C++.

C++ is edge case hell even for simple looking code

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#95

Post by mk89 »

cachius wrote: post #9

A recent superpower was added by Fil aka the pizlonator who made C more Fil-C with FUGC, a garbage collector with minimal adjustments to existing code, turning it into a memory safe implementation of the C and C++ programming languages you already know and love. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133938 https://fil-c.org/

Thank you so much for sharing this. I missed the HN post.

This is beautiful!

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#96

Post by atiedebee »

Maxatar wrote: post #83
dboon wrote: post #82

Nice, but if the intention is portability my experience has unfortunately been that you pretty much have to stick to C99. MSVC’s C compiler is rough, but pretty much necessary for actual cross platform. I have my own such header which has many, many things like the OP’s. As much as I would find it constantly useful, I don’t have a cleanup utility because of this. But if you can stay out of MSVC world, awesome! You ca…

MSVC now supports C17.

Does it support C99 with VLAs yet?

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#97

Post by kerkeslager »

I feel like there might be some value in this header file for some projects, but this is exactly the wrong use case.

> In cgrep, parsing command-line options the old way is a breeding ground for CVEs and its bestiary. You have to remember to free the memory on every single exit path, difficult for the undisciplined.

No, no, no. Command line options that will exist the entire lifetime of the program are the quintessential case for not ever calling free() on them because it's a waste of time. There is absolutely no reason to spend processor cycles to carefully call free() on a bunch of individual resources when the program is about to exit and the OS will reclaim the entire process memory in one go much faster than your program can. You're creating complexity and making your program slower and there is literally no upside: this isn't a tradeoff, it's a bad practice.

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#98

Post by 1718627440 »

dboon wrote: post #82

Nice, but if the intention is portability my experience has unfortunately been that you pretty much have to stick to C99. MSVC’s C compiler is rough, but pretty much necessary for actual cross platform. I have my own such header which has many, many things like the OP’s. As much as I would find it constantly useful, I don’t have a cleanup utility because of this. But if you can stay out of MSVC world, awesome! You ca…

You can use GCC on MS Windows just fine. Installing MSYS2 will also give you a package manager.

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#99

Post by kccqzy »

cassepipe wrote: post #53
fuhsnn wrote: post #23

> C23 gave us [[cleanup]] attributes C23 didn't introduce it, it's still a GCC extension that needs to be spelled as [[gnu::cleanup()]] https://godbolt.org/z/Gsz9hs7TE

It is surprisingly hard to find information about it, do you have any ? From what I can guess it's a new syntax but it's the feature itself is still an extension ?

The feature itself is probably still __attribute__((cleanup(f))). That’s documented at https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Variable-Attribute...

Re: Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

#100

Post by krautburglar »

kerkeslager wrote: post #97

I feel like there might be some value in this header file for some projects, but this is exactly the wrong use case. > In cgrep, parsing command-line options the old way is a breeding ground for CVEs and its bestiary. You have to remember to free the memory on every single exit path, difficult for the undisciplined. No, no, no. Command line options that will exist the entire lifetime of the program are the quintessen…

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