Re:Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]
by matheusmoreira on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @03:08PM
(#21651561)
> even today most important software powering modern computing are written in C, this speaks volume about its simplicity.
C code is simple in the sense that it closely matches the simple binary interfaces of the compiled code: plain symbols with simple calling conventions. Anything more complicated than this presents a seemingly insurmountable barrier to code reuse thats leads people to rewrite stuff in C.
The current situation is any code that's meant to be reused will be written in C so that every other language has access to the resulting functionality. The higher level languages either have much more complicated binary interfaces or are completely virtualized so code reuse is extremely difficult. C++ and Rust can export C interfaces but the benefits of those languages are not available to the users of the code because the interface has been reduced to C.
C code is simple in the sense that it closely matches the simple binary interfaces of the compiled code: plain symbols with simple calling conventions. Anything more complicated than this presents a seemingly insurmountable barrier to code reuse thats leads people to rewrite stuff in C.
The current situation is any code that's meant to be reused will be written in C so that every other language has access to the resulting functionality. The higher level languages either have much more complicated binary interfaces or are completely virtualized so code reuse is extremely difficult. C++ and Rust can export C interfaces but the benefits of those languages are not available to the users of the code because the interface has been reduced to C.