To become a good C programmer (2011)

by davikrr • 5 years ago

62 15 5 years ago

sharikone3• 5 years ago

As much as C is fantastic to work with, as the general idea of a low/high level language whose compilers are easy to implement, its pain points are annoying.

Integer conversions, literals, unhygienic macros, inconsistent library, overflows, zero-ended strings are all very very fastidious to work with.

I really hope that Zig will grow up because it seems the best promising alternative to C right now. In 20 years or so it might even get a significant market share... Then it will be the turn of POSIX and by 2100 low level system programming will be fixed

ibraheemdev• 5 years ago

I don't want to be that guy, but have you tried Rust? If so, what makes it not the C replacement for you?

vips7L• 5 years ago

Rust is far more complicated in every aspect.

sharikone3• 5 years ago

They basically answered you. Rust is very complex and big.

A C compiler is relatively easy to implement and it's easy to follow its output if you care about the assembly. For tasks like that, where you want just a lightweight structured programming language on top of assembly, C is very good in principle.

I just want to leave out idiosyncrasies like its automatic type conversions, Rust is way way overkill (and difficult to implement).

Rust is meant to be a replacement for C++, and even then, even if we acknowledge its many merits and C++'s horrible disadvantages, it will always have the handicap of being "different". You can organically grow your abstractions by moving from Assembly, to C, to C++, all in small steps. Writing something in Rust requires somewhat a bigger, discontinuous, step. Not their fault, but that's the state of the ecosystem.

winrid• 5 years ago

Nim is fantastic, too.

555dreams• 5 years ago

This is a really great list for learning C89/C99! I have to double recommend "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets", such a fascinating and fun book (albeit showing some age).

Darkslide_rocks• 5 years ago

K&R is full of gems, cannot recommend that enough for C. Great not only as reference but initial learning. It’s also so humbling that something 40+ years old (published ‘78) is still used so frequently today.

ternaryoperator• 5 years ago

K&R is a masterpiece, but I would recommend the 2nd edition from 1988 so that the language as taught is a little more modern (essentially C89)

ohazi• 5 years ago

I also used to religiously target C89 for "maximum compatibility" (`-ansi -pedantic`). But the problem with this approach is that it's 2021, and C89 doesn't have a concurrency model.

FFS, use C11 or newer. Even if you're writing for consoles and weird microcontrollers, the compilers have mostly caught up.

To become a good C programmer (2011)

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