Fare: Metaprogramming from the ground up: avoid C

http://fare.livejournal.com/135078.html

by rplevy • 18 years ago

4 5 18 years ago

fare.livejournal.com

qwph• 18 years ago

But that doesn't mean it is impossible to write trivial harmful metaprograms in CPP, as is easily demonstrated in my counter-example die_die_stupid_c_compiler.c

I'm slightly disappointed that

  gcc -E die_die_stupid_c_compiler.c

didn't die, although it did produce about 750k of output, which is quite impressive...

kinghajj• 18 years ago

Can anyone explain why this takes so long to compile? It doesn't look that complicated.

Edit: I compiled with "gcc -O3 -s", which took 8 minutes, but the executable is only 4784 bytes.

fp2• 18 years ago

The long compilation time is due to the optimization options. Without optimization it compiles in a few seconds.

Yet, the macros leave plenty of space for optimization. See the size of your executable compared to the unoptimized one of qwph above.

fp2• 18 years ago

"Like Perl, C++ is a swiss army chainsaw of a programming language. Unlike Perl, it's got all the blades simultaneously and permanently cast in a fixed half-open position. Don't turn it on."

Priceless.

wheels• 18 years ago

Uhm, I find this post kind of uninspired. Did it really require experimental verification to show that meta-programming in C probably wasn't a good idea?

I find this sort of argument in general a bit straw-man-ish. They use a programming language for something it's not suited for and then reflect that back on the programming language.

Fare: Metaprogramming from the ground up: avoid C

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