News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on C’s Biggest Mistake (2009). Parent comment

Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by WalterBright on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:13PM (#24457620)
I don't see much point in it. I've proposed this change to C in front of several audiences, and it never received any traction. If you want to experiment with it, you can use DasBetterC, i.e. running the D compiler with the `-betterC` switch, which enables programs to be built requiring only the C Standard Library.

Fair warning - once you get accustomed to DasBetterC, you're not likely to want to go back to C :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by ratww on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:39PM (#24457760)
> If you want to experiment with it, you can use DasBetterC, i.e. running the D compiler with the `-betterC`

I've been meaning to experiment with DasBetterC for a while, and I have a project C I've been wanting to migrate to something with proper strings (it's an converter for some binary file formats, but now I want it to import some obscure text formats too). Maybe that's the push I needed :)

After 20 minutes and about 250 out of 2098 lines converted, the error messages are very good and give very nice hints about what to change, I must say I prefer them to Rust's verbose messages.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by WalterBright on Sunday September 13, 2020 @12:10AM (#24458251)
Great!

DasBetterC's trial-by-fire was when I used it to convert DMD's backend from C to D.

I'm sure you already know this, but the trick to translating is to resist the urge to refactor and fix bugs while you're at it. Convert files one at a time, and after each run the test suite.

Only after it's all converted and passing the test suite can refactoring and bug fixing be considered.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by zestyping on Sunday September 13, 2020 @01:45AM (#24458684)
I don't get why it hasn't gotten traction. When I read it, it was immediately obvious to me that this would be extremely helpful. I want it yesterday, and so should everyone.
[ Parent | on HN ]