“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success”

Re:“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success” – Dennis R... by jrvarela56 on Sunday July 09, 2023 @10:17AM (#36654626)

Thank you for the input, one point that stood out for me was that you prefer to write command-line utilities with C.

Why is that? I use scripting languages mostly in my day work (Ruby and some Python bc AI) and have found my productivity using command-line utilities is amazing with Ruby. Do you do it bc of performance, ease of use bc you are proficient, a mix of both or something else?

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Re:“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success” – Dennis R... by pkkm on Sunday July 09, 2023 @11:13AM (#36655121)

Oh, I don't use C for every command-line utility. If it's something IO-bound like parsing a webpage and downloading a bunch of files linked from it, I write it in Python. The convenience of modules like argparse and requests is very hard to beat, and it would take me a lot longer to do it in C.

I reach for C when performance matters, for example when processing multi-GB files or looking for perceptual hashes that are similar. It can be a difference between minutes and hours of running time.

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