C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

http://blog.lse.epita.fr/articles/12-c---system-oriented-programming.html

by kalenz • 14 years ago

90 83 14 years ago

blog.lse.epita.fr

alexchamberlain2• 14 years ago

I have a couple of problems with their analysis of C.

There's no typed macros

There are inlined functions...

While the type system of C is basically size based, a lot of types have an ambiguous size (int for example)

Use stdint.h definitions.

Having said that, I would like namespaces in C!

cmdkeen• 14 years ago

But they've identified this as for systems based programming where you don't have any guarantee of stdint.h holding true (POSIX compliance). Their implementation is much more flexible. Albeit slightly reinventing the wheel.

alexchamberlain2• 14 years ago

I can see what you mean, but stdint.h is just a bunch of typedefs stardardising the naming scheme. It doesn't take much work to sort it out.

cube132• 14 years ago

If you're doing systems level programming, you shouldn't be counting on anything being portable anyway. Reimplementing it is worthless for projects are on a single OS. If you're implementing the OS, then these decisions need to be made anyway, independent of the language.

You should be coding to(or with) the OS you're working on. If you're doing multiplatform stuff, then #defines with a naming scheme work, and are already the standard practice.

simias5• 14 years ago

Indeed, however this first blog post doesn't tell us much about the language itself. The couple examples seem a bit... anecdotal.

I'd also like to point out that setting individual bits in an integer is not usually atomic. So the "syntactic sugar" here could be pretty error-prone (and I can't say it was very high on my list of "features I wish C had").

kibwen4• 14 years ago

I think that languages that are a just thin shell on top of C (as opposed to languages that merely target C, e.g. Chicken Scheme) might have some potential. I'll call this coffeescriptification--still eagerly awaiting the first transpiled language that does nothing but remove C's braces and semicolons. If someone doesn't do it by next April Fools, I certainly will (I already have the name in mind: Glee (the italics are part of the name, and mandatory)).

marcusf2• 14 years ago

Sounds like what you're looking for is the original Bash source code, circa 1977, for example [1]:

  LOCAL STRING	copyto(endch)
  	REG CHAR	endch;
  {
  	REG CHAR	c;
  
  	WHILE (c=getch(endch))!=endch ANDF c
  	DO pushstak(c|quote) OD
  	zerostak();
  	IF c!=endch THEN error(badsub) FI
  }

Applicable macros if you want to give your code that classic ALGOL 68 smell in [2].

[1] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/...

[2] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/...

phillmv• 14 years ago

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."

jff3• 14 years ago

Hate to be pedantic, but that's the Bourne shell, not bash.

pavlov• 14 years ago

I wonder why IF closes with FI, REP closes with PER and LOOP closes with POOL, but SWITCH fails to complete the series: it closes with ENDSW...

Why not go all the way with HCTIWS, when you've already abandoned your sanity to Cthulhu?

dragonbonheur3• 14 years ago

Funny how everyone wants to program in BASIC but doesn't want to admit it. Like the Python and Lua guys. Try FreeBASIC, it's a compiler.

norswap• 14 years ago

Not sure if irony, or really dumb comment.

jksmith• 14 years ago

Haha! Or insert Pascal in there and try out some FreePascal, the perennial number 5 to 8 on most the alioth shootouts for the past 20 years.

0xABADC0DA• 14 years ago

One thing often overlooked in language design is the filename. It's 2012, why are languages still stuck with IBM-era filename extentions when they could use unicode?! For instance:

Rust: filename.ℛ

Java: filename.☕

Glee: filename.☺

Isn't that just so much clearer and nicer-looking than ".rs" or ".java" or ".g"? It's really the fine aesthetic points like this that can make or break a language.

Arelius7• 14 years ago

Uhh, sure.

kibwen4• 14 years ago

Brilliant. I'll be sure to mention your <s>name</s> memory address in the foreword of the obligatory O'Reilly book (taking suggestions for the cover animal; I'm partial to the thylacine, myself).

One suggested improvement: Rust's extension should preferably be .® to jive with the language's official logo.[1] And with the advent of emoji, we can give Perl a file extension of .🐪 (Unicode Character 'DROMEDARY CAMEL' (U+1F42A)). Perl 6 can get the bactrian camel instead.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rust_programming_language_...

sigzero• 14 years ago

I am sure your sarcasm tag is on. That would be horrible.

muyuu• 14 years ago

It's not clearer at all for me, especially when some of these characters won't render reliably on several platforms (for instance, the java char isn't showing in this browser right now).

Extensions and filenames can be made not to be so central, which I'd consider a more reasonable development over superficial silly hacks like that. This is IDE domain, definitely in 2012 and for years to come.

If you want to render your extensions to funny happy Unicode symbols in your specific purpose file manager, then fine by me. Actually storing filenames like that would just make you a number of new enemies.

kodablah• 14 years ago

I too am looking for this in Java. Especially if the transpiler was easily extendable to add your own language features. The key would be to make sure it transpiles both ways so that it could be adopted in a corporate, Java-only environment.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

What could be more tedious than another low-level language based on subtle complaints about C?

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Complaining that someone has invented a new low-level language?

stcredzero• 14 years ago

What could be more tedious than another low-level language based on subtle complaints about C?

YALLBOSCAC? How about a language named YALL and boscc as the name of the compiler?

zem• 14 years ago

seriously? i personally think this is an enormously exciting space to watch people explore, and i'm glad that the field seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts at the moment. there are a lot of powerful features that modern languages have developed, and if some of them can be brought to the C world without sacrificing the low-level features that systems programmers need, it will benefit everyone.

dmpk2k2• 14 years ago

How about a few more default data structures, like resizable arrays or hashes? I find the biggest bump in my productivity in most other languages is that those two things are there already.

simias5• 14 years ago

The problem is dynamic memory allocation. It's actually one of the gripes I have with the "rust" language [1]. As a C coder I find it hard to take seriously a language that don't let me customize memory allocation easily.

It's not impossible to do right though, C++ has "allocators" parameter templates to do exactly that (there's a default implementation that you can "override" with a custom class).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027777

marijn• 14 years ago

Rust isn't finished yet. It's about to get 'regions', which come with custom allocators.

kibwen4• 14 years ago

To complement Marijn's response, here's a blog post from one of the Rust developers that gives a bit of an introduction into regions:

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/04/25/refe...

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

Allocators were well intentioned, but writing them is not a walk in the park, and you cannot pass, say, a “std::vector<T, my_allocator<T>>” to a function expecting “const std::vector<T>&”.

dmpk2k2• 14 years ago

That's why I mentioned "default". If you have more specialized requirements, you can write your own version. :)

ArbitraryLimits• 14 years ago

The STL's templatization over allocators is over allocator class, not allocator instance which makes them effectively useless IMO.

antirez2• 14 years ago

I didn't checked the details, but I would love to see ten attempts every year, trying to solve the same problem.

D and Go are not trying to provide us with a better C, because they don't share the concept of, a language that translates straightforward to assembler, but still is designed so that you can mount good abstractions with it.

This is what you need for kernel programming, embedded systems, and a good deal of system programming as well.

At the same point C is one of the top-used languages in the world, with a vast code base, and yet almost all the attempts in the languages area are about much higher level or exoteric stuff. Not that I don't want that kind of research, but it's bizzarre that no one is focusing where a lot of meat is.

I bet this better C will arise in a few years at max, and it is not going to come from academia. Times are mature apparently, there is even a C conf this year ;)

Dn_Ab• 14 years ago

hi antirez, do you have a top contender from the current crop or a suspicion of which/what C Next would be like? I would guess that you would also eliminate languages like ATS, Felix, Rust and Vala.

What about languages like Cyclone, decac, Clay?

pjmlp12• 14 years ago

Native Oberon, Spin, Singularity, Home, Inferno are all operating systems written in GC enabled system programming languages.

D and Go are just following that thread.

Eventually all mainstream OS will have such type of languages and C will be legacy.

Microsoft is already slowly doing that by dropping support for C later than C90, and adding COM based API as the default Windows API. Now mainly for Metro, perhaps for the complete OS in later versions.

Apple as well, by adding reference counting and GC on their systems language, Objective-C.

C only got spread thanks to UNIX, and brought upon us the wrath of buffer overruns and dangling pointers security exploits.

We need better languages for doing systems programming.

Arelius7• 14 years ago

Interesting that none of those systems are in active usage...

> Eventually all mainstream OS will have such type of languages and C will be legacy.

That's just speculation. Personally I have high hopes for languages with optional-only GC, and much stricter memory management principals. Ala, Rust.

pcwalton2• 14 years ago

Note that Apple is abandoning garbage collection for Objective-C.

Additionally, GC is not strictly necessary to solve buffer overruns and dangling pointers. Region-based memory management is an alternative for many use cases.

jff3• 14 years ago

I love Inferno, but the actual kernel is written in C, not Limbo.

ams6110• 14 years ago

Objective-C was not created by Apple.

cube132• 14 years ago

What requirements would you have for a better C? The only major requirement that I can think of is that it's compiled directly to assembly without requiring an intermediate runtime or VM. This helps avoid the fundamental "chicken and egg" problem that a lot of higher level languages have. This means that GC needs to be an optional component. It does not specifically exclude it, however.

chwahoo• 14 years ago

> I bet this better C will arise in a few years at max, and it is not going to come from academia.

I take this statement to mean: Academia is failing us by not providing us with the next generation C. If that was the intent, I think it's not a fair jab.

Academia IS actively investigating low-level languages: ATS, Cyclone, and typed assembly are all examples. But, it's not academia's job to create widely-used languages and tools. Sometimes they do create something that achieves wide use, but that's mostly a side benefit. Their job is to generate and evaluate useful "idea nuggets" that can inform future system builders and to train students to do novel systematic research.

There seems to be a common meme that academic CS is "out of touch" with what real developers need. I think it's mostly unfair: while the world always needs a slightly better web framework, compiler, language, etc., that's not the goal of academic CS; they aim to fertilize the ground with ideas that facilitate the growth of more big and small ideas.

antirez2• 14 years ago

> I take this statement to mean: Academia is failing us by not providing us with the next generation C. If that was the intent, I think it's not a fair jab.

I don't want to say that academia is failing or should responsible of giving us this "better C", just where I guess we should look to see "new C" coming is not there. However I think that academia may have a role in this matter, that is, to study the interaction between the programmer and the programming language about getting things done. This is probably done (but I can't remember famous recent studies about this) and could provide useful hints about how we can incrementally build / modify C to get a more reliable and less bug prone language.

However ultimately "new C" will be designed by one or two guys at max, as it always happened with this kind of practical programming languages.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

I mostly agree, but I would make a small correction: that's not what academic CS is paid for. Jonathan Shapiro didn't stop work on BitC because he ran out of enthusiasm but because he ran out of funding. Habit will only remain a live project while its PIs can keep the ~~grant money~~ spice flowing.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Regarding the use of integers as bit arrays, it would be nice if the syntax supported referring to a subset of the bits, similarly to bitfields in structs.

Example based on the syntax from the article:

  x: int<+32>;
  x[0:6] = 42; // Set six bits starting with lsb 0 to 42

slashvar2• 14 years ago

Yes, this is in the TODO list ;)

In fact, it doesn't reach top priority since we can do without for now (we have bitfields.) The issue with slicing is more a question of design: does slicing need to be constant expression or should we authorize more expression power (and then how could we implement that and how could we check it … )

Anyway, I'm looking for a clever way to define values accessed in a none uniform ways.

Integer as bit array was the simplest idea to test (and seems useful to me.) Now the compiler has almost everything I need to implement easily that kind of syntactic sugars.

protomyth• 14 years ago

If we are going to play at the low level, taking a look at Machine Forth might not hurt.

ThomasBHickey2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised of no mention of Bliss. Nice low-level DEC-10 language, later generalized a bit.

draven• 14 years ago

I remember reading about it in an article by Olin Shivers (the history of T, at http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html ).

After reading the wikipedia page about it, it doesn't seem to be available for any common platform.

How would it perform as a system programming language today (compared to C) ?

ThomasBHickey2• 14 years ago

It would work fine. It had bit-level operators, easy assembler integration, simple macros. Decent looping constucts after the first version. Everything was an expression which makes lots of things easier and a good optimizing compiler (rember Wulf?). It did have a major quirk: you had to be explicit on addresses vs. values. To get a value you put a '.' in front of an address. Used to drive some people crazy, but I never had any problem (much) with it.

eduadecastro• 14 years ago

I guess its time I made my own language... everybody's doing it!

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

An uncommonly high number of people on HN (or mentioned in stories posted to HN) are programming language enthusiasts, so it certainly seems like it.

C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

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