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C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

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Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#91

Post by pjmlp »

drnick1 wrote: post #29
mjg59 wrote: post #19

I really don't understand why people keep misunderstanding this post so badly. It's not a complaint about C as a programming language. It's a complaint that, due to so much infrastructure being implemented in C, anyone who wants to interact with that infrastructure is forced to deal with some of the constraints of C. C has moved beyond merely being a programming language and become the most common interface for in-pr…

I don't see that as a problem. C has been the bedrock of computing since the 1970s because it is the most minimal way of speaking to the hardware in a mostly portable way. Anything can be done in C, from writing hardware drivers, to GUI applications and scientific computing. In fact I deplore the day people stopped using C for desktop applications and moved to bloated, sluggish Web frameworks to program desktop apps.…

Of some computing platforms.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#92

Post by pjmlp »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #24
mjg59 wrote: post #19

I really don't understand why people keep misunderstanding this post so badly. It's not a complaint about C as a programming language. It's a complaint that, due to so much infrastructure being implemented in C, anyone who wants to interact with that infrastructure is forced to deal with some of the constraints of C. C has moved beyond merely being a programming language and become the most common interface for in-pr…

VHDL vs Verilog is a good parallel from the chip world. VHDL was designed from ground up. Verilog is loosely based on C. Most designs are done in Verilog.

VHDL tends to reign in European hardware companies.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#94

Post by ghosty141 »

kristianp wrote: post #64
stackghost wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C just minimally reflects how computers work. The rest is just convention. This hasn't been true for decades. x86 assembly is now itself an abstraction over what the CPU is actually doing. Microcode, speculative execution, etc.

It seems to be a meme on HN that C doesn't reflect hardware, now you're extending that to assembly. It seems silly to me. It was always an approximation of what happens under the hood, but I think the concepts of pointers, variable sizes and memory layout of structs all represent the machine at some level.

Its not a meme.

For example, C has pointer provenance, so pointers arent just addresses. Thats why type punning is such a mess. If a lang claims to be super close to the hardware this seems like a very weird thing.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#95

Post by kreco »

pjmlp wrote: post #78
nacozarina wrote: post #3

None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be different anyway. Carpenters, plumbers, masons & electricians work on houses 3-300 yrs old, navigate the range of legacy styles & tech they encounter, and predictably get good outcomes. Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. C99, baby, why pay more…

Outside UNIX clones, and embedded space where it is mostly a religious point of view than available compiler toolchains, C has already been displaced. Even the most relevant C compilers are no longer written in C.

> Even the most relevant C compilers are no longer written in C.

Worth to point out that most of the C compilers are also C++ compilers.

So the point is kind of distorted.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#97

Post by kreco »

munificent wrote: post #16
pizlonator wrote: post #7

It’s weird how whiny this post is. Like there’s zero intellectual curiosity about why C got this way, and why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written. I could write a whole essay about why, but now isn’t the time. I’m just going to enjoy the fact that TFA and the author don’t get it.

> why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written. Is there an answer here more interesting than "it's what Unix and Windows were written in, so that's how programs talked to the OS, and once you have an interface, it's impossible to change"?

I'm not sure I agree with "impossible to change".

It's 2026, to this date I cannot use standard library/api, to open a file with utf-8 filename without a null terminating string.

When you want to talk to the OS you constantly face the need to had unnecessary overhead (allocation due to string convertion, strlen).

The OS itself does not prevent anything from having those standard "no overhead" API.

However, it's pretty clear that nobody cares to define some new sane interface and nobody care to deprecate old ones.

That would include both API and ABI.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#98

Post by okanat »

trueismywork wrote: post #30
okanat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are: - People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or…

Name me a stable binary interface that is not ints and arrays of ints

C ABI is more than how ints and array of ints sit next to each other in memory.

It cares about calling conventions and what you can store in registers vs what you cannot. There are multiple possible ways of doing an RPC call and C ABI only provides one way of doing it.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#99

Post by okanat »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #53
okanat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are: - People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or…

> People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. and so it was that after that date, all development of embedded systems kernel drivers digital audio workstations video editors codecs for audio and video anything that involved actually controlling non-computer hardware game engines came to a grinding halt, and no further work was done.

What I mean is all of those things are more of the same things we did since 90s.

It is better and higher performing hardware but until Rust and Zig arrived, the most popular ways of designing system-level software stayed the same. RTOSes work the same as how they work in late 90s / early 00s. C ABI is still the majority of communication interface. Interacting with OS using system calls stayed the same. After virtual memory and paging no big change in OS design happened. Main programming design patterns in C and C++ also stayed the same.

One area that stayed interesting is GPU programming. Nowadays CPUs basically provide us a PDP-11 simulator. Most of the time you don't need to recompile programs to harness most of the gains from a CPU. GPUs expose more of their internal hardware detaila than CPUs and unlike CPUs you need to recompile programs (which is what a GPU userspace driver does) to use newer models.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#100

Post by 1718627440 »

ghosty141 wrote: post #94
kristianp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be a meme on HN that C doesn't reflect hardware, now you're extending that to assembly. It seems silly to me. It was always an approximation of what happens under the hood, but I think the concepts of pointers, variable sizes and memory layout of structs all represent the machine at some level.

Its not a meme. For example, C has pointer provenance, so pointers arent just addresses. Thats why type punning is such a mess. If a lang claims to be super close to the hardware this seems like a very weird thing.

C is super close to the hardware in that it works exactly like the abstract C machine, which is kind of a generalization of the common subset of a lot of machines, invented to make it portable, i.e. viable to be implemented straightforwardly on various architectures. For example pointer provenance makes it work on machines with segmented storage, these can occur anywhere, so there is no guarantee that addresses beyond a single allocation are expressible or meaningful.

What makes C feel free for programming is that instead of prescribing an implementation paradigm, it instead exposes a computing model and then lets the programmer write whatever is possible with that (and also what is not -- UB). And a lot of higher level abstractions are quickly implemented in C, e.g. inheritance and polymorphism, but then they still allow to be used in ways you like, so you can not just do pure class inheritance, but get creative with a vtable, or just use another vtable with the same object. These are things you can't do when the classes are a language construct.

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