C gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. And rightfully so. It's meant not to hold you back from doing voodoo with low-level stuff. It came out in a time when everyone was coding assembly.
This was before my time, but I think it's a common misconception (only true for operating system development). When C was created, there was already Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Algol, Simula, BASIC... and SmallTalk and Prolog were just around the corner - and most of those are much higher level than C).
Exactly this. This belief that Rust can and even will replace C is at best ignorant and at worst evangelical. In fact I’m convinced most Rust enthusiasts on HN are less involved in programming and more with politics.
While I’m all for mem-safe languages Rust is simply too abstract and undefined to work on any real embedded systems work. At most, it can work on the driver level, but even that code will need to be constantly redone as the language ages without any proper specifications.
...interesting that you mention that, I think that functions and structs are the essential 'core abstraction tools' that get you to at least 80% of any higher level abstractions that were invented since then, and this is exactly the reason why C is still quite popular. Its feature set is just enough to be considered a high level language which enables abstractions, but not more (especially no fads and fashions that came and disappeared again).
It is a urban myth that C was the first one, usually pushed by naturally UNIX folks.
JOVIAL, ESPOL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/S, PL.8, PL/M, Bliss, Mesa, Modula-2, VMS Basic, VMS Pascal,...
If this was intended to illustrate the unexpected consequences of undefined behavior it succeeded remarkably well!
I will utterly kill all humor by explaining it:
They made a funny observation about a thing that happens. The thing that happens is (today) called UB. The funny observation is that that comment kind of exhibited the outward appearance of what the effects of UB could look like.
It began reciting one metaphore, "enough rope to hang yourself" but mid-way unexpectedly switched to a different metaphore "shoot yourself in the foot", producing a combined invalid nonsensical output. As though a program suffered some UB in the routine for looking up and printing metaphores.
The comment author might have done it on purpose. Maybe they intended to make exactly that joke.
The history of the term UB has no more bearing than the history of any of the other words used.
eg. C leaves the case of exceeding the size of an int undefined. In most cases it has a predictable effect on modern, mostly similar architectures but that is by no means guaranteed, and forcing an architecture to calculate overflow a particular way seems like a negative.
That being said, everyone has a pet example of a compiler doing some really odd and deep optimisations - I suspect that’s mostly due to successive layers and optimisers adding up to have unexpected effects, rather than a deliberate effort by compiler writers - but I’m no expert on the matter.
Section 4. Conformance says "A strictly conforming program shall only use those features of the language and library specified in this International Standard. It shall not produce output dependent on any unspecified, undefined, or implementation-defined behavior, and shall not exceed any implementation limit."
Compilers are not allowed to produce output dependent on UB for strictly conforming ISO C programs, they must optimize those statements out. Treating UB as impossible is required for ISO C. It's NOT required for GNU C, or Clang C, or Microsoft Visual C, but they usually do so anyway (even though they're not compiling strictly conforming ISO C programs).
Expect to hear from @pjmlp on this!
struct strbuf { size_t cap, len; char *str; };
void sb_setf(struct allocator *a, struct strbuf *sb, const char *fmt, ...);
void sb_appendf(struct allocator *a, struct strbuf *sb, const char *fmt, ...);
// have other convenience functions for formatting fixed point values like "prefix AAA.BBB suffix" ("voltage: 7.23 V")
// special helpers for dates, times, etc.
If you’re extremely lucky, things will compile and work.
If you’re just lucky things won’t compile, and you’ll have to write conversion functions (or macros).
If you’re unlucky, there will be subtle differences, likely poorly documented, between the libraries, and code will compile but have subtle bugs.
Of course, other languages have that problem, too, but at the higher level of json parsers or graphics libraries, not at the basic level of strings, lists, or maps.
As a C programmer shouldn't you have a library abstracting all this by now? Either your own or one of the dozens available, including pascal-style strings?
The long term cost of those decisions as well as the number of really bad bugs (and security issues) that can be traced back to one-off code is likely much larger than the same figure for well used libraries. But it all sort of evens out whenever a bug in such a library is found because then it is so widespread that lots of systems will suffer.
Weird how that works.
Well, not sure about the LISP programmers, but C programmers have a good reason: they work under different environments (from embedded to Windows, legacy UNIX, the latest Ubuntu, ...) and also have different needs, regarding allocation, string management, etc. So one-size-fits-all lib might not cut it for everybody. It can also be as simple as having an inherited codebase which uses something else.
Still, there are popular string libraries, and C programmers do use them when they can.
The only problem is C is simply not expressive enough to have proper abstractions like that.
Everything else, however, cannot.
Their industry uses are highly different as well. C is almost a requirement for embedded systems, and while C++/Rust can be used there, they’re simply too complex and in Rust’s case additionally too young to be adopted. C++, and possibly Rust (if it can get its act together), are more used in high level programming, as that’s what they’re built for.
If C++ could do what C can, then why is the Linux kernel 98.5% C code? Wouldn’t it be better to use a more varied and powerful language?
Or, maybe different languages have different use cases and cannot be directly slotted in to replace one another.
As a result to some extent GCC and Clang are also compilers for some sort of "Linux C" which is strongly reminiscent of the ISO standard language but distinct.
And there's no reason you would choose C++ for a project where you'd otherwise use C on account of the (exaggerated) relationship between the two languages, the reason you'd do it would be that you want C++ features, and Linus doesn't want C++ features. Projects to "just" compile the existing Linux code but with C++ compilers failed AFAIK.
And maybe this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477113.3487274
(I agree though that the C standard isn't actually relevant in the real world, most C compilers treat it more or less as a 'suggestion', unless enforced with options like '-pedantic')
What does language complexity has to do with anything? It will get compiled down to machine code, and both can be and are used for embedded. They occupy the exact same low-level niche as C, hell, they may be even more level as they can also do things like SIMD.
Linux kernel is C because Linus doesn’t like C++, it’s that easy. And usually no, why would you use multiple languages in a project if you don’t have a good reason?
Sure, it's possible (you can write C in C++, for the most part, and to its credit, C++ has placement new). But many of C++'s niceties require memory allocation, making much of its value-add over C questionable.
The first version used preprocessor macro tricks for generatic code, basically what Go folks re-discovered with //go:generate, we already had it in 1992.
BIDS 2.0 already used templates.
It was exactly because even C++ for MS-DOS provided safer library than C, that I was never that into C. It wasn't better than TP in features and safety, only in portability, and that I could get from C++ anyway.
And/or you need a crate like alloc, heapless, etc.
For the sake of a sprintf "abstraction"...
std::string_view would have been a good thing if it hadn't added another memory corruption foot gun.
A general string type is one of those things where you can either have convenience or performance, but never both.
Obviously, this isn't necessarily an improvement, but in theory you could do this:
size_t getlength( int m, char (*p) [m] ) { return sizeof *p; }
char mystring[] = "Hello";
getlength( sizeof mystring, &mystring )
The very common thing I want to use in C is some sort of variable size string object. But no, I have to dynamically allocate a buffer that I know will be at least the right size for any text I ever put into it, or do I create a buffer that's the correct size for that string but re-alloc if I ever change it to a longer string. But then how do I store the buffer size? Do I want to create a struct that constains a point to the buffer and the length, or use sizeof() to calculate the string length? But then I can't use sizeof() if I pass that buffer into a function via a pointer. If I pass that string to a function is it being copied straight away or just storing the pointer so I can't change the string at a later date. I can't enforce copy semantics
And god forbid you ever forget to include space for the NULL
I just want a string I can dump some text in, I don't want to go searching for libraries, I don't want to have to consider allocation and copying and all that crap. If I wrote half of my boilerplate C code in python it would look just as simple and beautiful (if not more)