What’s to love about C?

http://mortoray.com/2012/06/11/whats-to-love-about-c/

by nkurz • 14 years ago

139 149 14 years ago

gouranga5• 14 years ago

The thing I love about C is that it the most obedient of all languages and never assumes you are an idiot. Never does it tell me I'm about to blow my own foot off - it just does it and I've learned from the experience. Due to this it taught me how to think about things first and know of all the consequences of doing everything.

*NIX is the same.

bornhuetter3• 14 years ago

There is something wonderful about low level programming langauges. I enjoy writing code and knowing exactly what the ASM is going to look like.

Python is fun, but I've got no idea how it is doing what it does.

domlebo70• 14 years ago

How often do you need to know what it's doing?

uhhyeahdude8• 14 years ago

This is exactly why I'm learning the various ASM right now. I am not content (depending on what I'm trying to do, of course) with a program just doing "something" that works.

simias• 14 years ago

This is very true but in my experience it's not always a good thing. It often leads me to premature optimization for instance.

ajanuary2• 14 years ago

Doing exactly what you told it is fine until you hit one of the many undefined behaviours and then it does exactly what you thought you told it only some of the time.

There's a lot of undefined behaviours to know about, and not all of them are obvious. You can be merrily compiling your programs fine on GCC and Clang and your intended behaviour seem entirely obvious, only to have it blow up on another compiler or with some different compiler flags.

That said, the undefined behaviours do allow the compilers to do some very tight optimisations, so swings and roundabouts.

gouranga5• 14 years ago

That tends to matter less if you have a decent test harness and plenty of assertions!

rpearl2• 14 years ago

The following program compiles without warnings using gcc 4.7.0. The compiler uses the undefined behavior of accessing a variable that may not have been initialized to turn the conditional into one that's always taken, and then folds it away.

https://gist.github.com/2910012

qznc2• 14 years ago

Interesting. Our compiler catches it, though:

  $ cparser -O3 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic test2.c -o uninit
  warning: ignoring gcc option '-pedantic'
  test2.c:3:6: warning: no previous declaration for 'void foo(int)' [-Wmissing-declarations]
  1 warning(s)
  test2.c:4:6: warning: 'variable lol' might be used uninitialized [-Wuninitialized]

Looking at the GCC bugtracker, there seem to be various warnings missing. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=uninitia...

plorkyeran• 14 years ago

clang does catch this:

  clang -Weverything uninit.c

  uninit.c:3:6: warning: no previous prototype for function 'foo' [-Wmissing-prototypes]
  void foo(int bar) {
     ^
  uninit.c:10:6: warning: variable 'lol' may be uninitialized when used here [-Wconditional-uninitialized]
        if (lol == 7) {
            ^~~
  uninit.c:4:9: note: initialize the variable 'lol' to silence this warning
        int lol;
               ^
                = 0
  uninit.c:37:3: warning: no newline at end of file [-pedantic,-Wnewline-eof]
  */
  ^

  3 warnings generated.

antirez• 14 years ago

valgrind:

   ==46592== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)
   ==46592==    at 0x100000E90: foo (in ./a.out)
   ==46592==    by 0x100000ED3: main (in ./a.out)

The matter is, valgrind exists. Everything is a C deficiency that valgrind is able to overcome decently is no longer a C deficiency practically speaking.

tezza2• 14 years ago

  * Lots of programmers you can hire today (contrast to D, ML, Haskell )
  * Excellent introductory texts (Kernighan & Ritchie)
  * Backed by giants like Microsoft, IBM
  * Everything else always has some mechanism to link against it
  * Thorough API documentation (if quite large) MSDN, man 3 sprintf

unwind• 14 years ago

I wouldn't quite agree that Microsoft are a good example of "backers" of C. Unless, of course, you consider backing for C++ to be enough. Microsoft's compiler doesn't support C99, and likely won't do so any time soon (http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/5...).

tezza2• 14 years ago

I don't mind the way MS does C .

Whacking variable declarations at the top of the scope becomes second nature quickly.

I came from assembly language, where the process is very similar and not too demanding

dkhenry6• 14 years ago

I think its a lot harder to find good C coders then you might think. For example 80% of people who claim to know C that interview with my company fail a test on reading a CSV file.

kiiski2• 14 years ago

But many of those 80% probably just haven't needed to use C, or read a CSV file, in a while. If someone randomly asked me to do that in Lisp, when I've been coding in Python for a year, it would take me a while to remember how to do it. But after working with Lisp for a week, I could do it easily again.

shadowmint• 14 years ago

ha, try asking them to write a program to list the contents of a directory. that'll give you an insight into their coding background...

tomjen32• 14 years ago

I would have to guess that they would fail in pretty much language unless you provided a clean file. Parsing simple text never, ever is.

randomdata• 14 years ago

To be fair, CSV is a relatively complex format with all kinds of edge cases and gotchas. In a test like situation, I'm sure 80% of the people would probably fail the test if done in any language.

gnuvince• 14 years ago

Not sure I'd still qualify K&R as an excellent introduction to C in this day and age; the book lacks focus on safety, which is so important today. It's fine for learning the language, but a language is more than its features.

alexchamberlain2• 14 years ago

There's an old adage that a computer only does what you tell it to do. What I love about C? It really does only do what you ask it to; nothing more, nothing less.

JohannL2• 14 years ago

I was just typing up a reply saying just that in more words when I saw yours; so for the sake of efficiency I'll just make my post a pointer to yours ^^

derleth3• 14 years ago

> It really does only do what you ask it to; nothing more, nothing less.

Not even assembly language has this property anymore, especially in the presence of an OS.

Which leads me to what I think is C's greatest weakness: It's no longer a thin layer over assembly language. It is so far removed from the current trends hardware design it doesn't even have functions that implement memory barriers as part of the core language, let alone any language features to help you take advantage of whatever SIMD hardware the machine possesses.

Part of this is C becoming a victim of its own success: People expect the same language to compile down to ARM and x86-64 and IBM mainframe (zSeries) and so on and so forth machine code, and do it in an efficient manner. Since low-end ARM chips don't have SIMD, C can't have SIMD, the thinking goes (even though low-end hardware doesn't have FP opcodes, either, but floating-point math is still part of the C standard).

They rely on compilers to make it fast, which is reasonable to some extent but it's also the same thing you rely on when you write in Haskell. It's contrary to the spirit of things.

I'm not advocating a return to assembly language. That would be massively stupid. However, it would be nice to have a language with concise syntax that also allows you access to the processor's status word (the carry flag, for instance).

kzrdude• 14 years ago

C has memory barriers now in C11.

gaius4• 14 years ago

Right, but you would just link against the appropriate library, BLAS or whatever, that is hand-tuned for your platform and exposes a C API.

anonymoushn• 14 years ago

When C does what you ask it to do, you're probably just getting lucky. It's more or less impossible to write a nontrivial C program without relying on undefined behavior.

qznc2• 14 years ago

Enable all warnings and fix them!

stephencanon• 14 years ago

With the exception of the translation limits (a strict reading of which may allow a compiler that can only compile a single program), it's pretty much trivial to avoid undefined behavior.

Implementation-defined behavior can be harder to avoid, but that's not a problem if you're targeting a known implementation.

uhhyeahdude8• 14 years ago

I agree with all of these comments. But... Unless you are an old-school coder who grew up with C, it is just so much easier to get stuff done with Python/Ruby or, hell, Bash/Awk/Perl. Granted, that last was for very specific tasks, but still. Want to write security code? C is is your friend, but you better be good at it, very good.

exDM697• 14 years ago

> Unless you are an old-school coder who grew up with C, it is just so much easier to get stuff done with Python/Ruby or, hell, Bash/Awk/Perl.

True, but who is going to write your Python/Ruby interpreters then? And using what language?

uhhyeahdude8• 14 years ago

Oh, you are certainly on point. But how deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go? I mean, after reading "Trusting Trust", you really can't be sure of anything. Who writes your compilers? Assuming you are not specifically referring to security stuff, and more talking about a responsible community; well, I don't know. I do know that I need to get better at C. And that that was w/r/t interpreter comment, in case that implication was not obvious.

shiven• 14 years ago

> True, but who is going to write your Python/Ruby interpreters then?

Pythonistas will.

> And using what language?

Using python. Case in point, Pypy.

<\ :P>

uhhyeahdude8• 14 years ago

And, look, I'm relatively new to the game, so please forgive my ignorance when it appears - although I definitely get what you are saying with this comment.

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

For web and system administration tasks, sure. For anything where performance is an issue, you simply won't be using an interpreted language.

C is by no means my go-to language for personal projects, but there's still a helluva lot of software out there that it would be folly to write in anything but.

dkhenry6• 14 years ago

I am going to make the bold claim that everyone should know C. Even in a world where we can do 90%+ of our coding in a higher level language we still aren't at the place were we can get past writing out performance loops in C. Case in point my company recently needed to speed up a 128bit AND on two MySQL binary fields. While this can be done in pure SQL implementing the function in C saved an order of magnitude of time. Everyone is going to run into these performance problems and until we have run times that can match hand coded C it will in my option still be a required skill to have.

( Yes I know you can s/C/ASM , however this is a time issue eventually we may get past needing C , but we are not there yet )

exDM697• 14 years ago

> I am going to make the bold claim that everyone should know C.

I agree. Anyone who's going to be working at a non-entry-level job in the computer industry should know what the foundations are built on. C still dominates in the kernel space and other low-level facilities everyone uses. If you don't know it, you are at a disadvantage compared to those who do.

mattmanser2• 14 years ago

Pah, 99.9% of programmers will never, ever, ever need to drop down to that level.

Where do these delusions even come from? I think a lot of people here would benefit from 6 months in a 'normal' company, the kind that employs the vast majority of programmers. Just for a bit of perspective.

hermanhermitage• 14 years ago

> I am going to make the bold claim that everyone should know C.

I agree.

The world of software is built on layers of abstractions. Both the skill of effortlessly layering abstractions and also the skill of peeling them away are fundamental to deep programming and modelling skills. Languages like LISP open the door to effortless modelling, whilst a language like C strips implementation all bare.

Its nice and widely available, fairly neutral on programming style (in the imperative space - few "political" (eg objects) abstractions rammed down your throat that don't actually exist in the CPU).

It can be used in a semi-portable manner, and inter-operates easily with assembler as required.

Boxing, GC, forced classes, and so forth still are not free. They are close to free in many problem domains - but you cant make them go away in other languages when they get in the way.

bornhuetter3• 14 years ago

So maybe Bloomberg should learn C?

gaius4• 14 years ago

It's funny, I tend to assume (because it mirrors my own experience, and my peers when I entered the industry) that everyone starts off as a C-on-Unix programmer, and specializes from there, into databases, or Windows programming, or whatever. But this isn't actually true, and makes people go cross-eyed when I say things like "just strace it" or "attach gdb and get me a backtrace". I grew up doing 6502 assembly language. Kids these days do HTML and JavaScript. They don't even know how far away from the machine they are, and when the "magic box" doesn't work, they're stumped.

A good programmer has the mentality "it's all turtles, all the way down", where a turtle means a thing that ultimately is just a piece of code, written by someone much like yourself, than you can understand inside out if only you take the time to do so. Even the CPU is just code (e.g. VHDL).

ecoffey• 14 years ago

My programming started on windows trying to learn java (classpath? wth is a directory??), then to dos prompts and rexx scripts, but I didn't really hit my stride until a neighbor helped me install TurboLinux.

I spent the next few months at the console (configure X, what am I a god?), with emacs, and gcc and it was glorious.

I still remember the day when I figured out I could declare a function in one place, and then define it in a different .c file, compile things individually and link them and it would work!

So yes, I agree I think everyone should learn C, since it's still the best, thinnest model for the Von Neumann architecture a typical computer provides you. And those early painful steps with C have really served me well when it comes to visualizing the mechanics of a problem

mdemare• 14 years ago

That's not a bold claim, that's a very safe claim. Learning C won't hurt anyone, except for the missed opportunities, which are invisible. But if you take all the "everybody should learn X" claims literally, you'll spend all your time learning.

So here's my counter-claim. Most Java and .NET developers will do just fine without knowledge of C.

dkhenry6• 14 years ago

Until you need to do something novel or unique. how useful would .NET be without pinvoke ? how many Java extensions exists out there ?

Above and beyond the practicality of being able to extend your language or debug it when it brakes in new and interesting ways, you also just have the general knowledge of how computers work that much more. This isn't to say you aren't any good, but if you want to be that much better you should learn C.

saraid216• 14 years ago

What's "just fine"? Paying the bills?

Symmetry• 14 years ago

Yes, and one of the reasons that this is a good idea is that the opportunity cost is so low. C is a pretty simple language. Mastering it is hard, but the number of rules you have to learn just isn't that big.

Confusion• 14 years ago

That claim doesn't really tell me anything without a measure. How much C should everyone know? I passed an introductory course in C, but that far from qualifies me to write any production-ready C. Every day I see some thread on C pitfalls here, many of which I would probably fall into once. What do you think someone should be able to do in C?

dkhenry6• 14 years ago

Generally knowing the syntax, how memory allocation and pointers work, the basics of calling functions, how to read the output of a back trace.

Furthermore not C directly but they should know how programs link and execute

cheatercheater2• 14 years ago

inb4: "Please don't learn anything, especially C".

markessien• 14 years ago

C is what you use when you should actually be using assembler, but you are not insane enough to actually do that.

alexchamberlain2• 14 years ago

Really? Optimiser's are pretty damn good, so C has pretty much replaced assembler.

exDM697• 14 years ago

The statement "C is portable assembly" may have been true some time in the 1970's but compilers have improved since then and the statement is no longer valid.

derleth3• 14 years ago

> compilers have improved

And hardware has changed. Remember, the C machine model (the virtual system you imagine in your head when you write C) doesn't have cache, doesn't have SIMD, and doesn't have any kind of ability to do things in parallel.

exDM697• 14 years ago

After using C++ for years (in addition to Python, Haskell, etc) I've recently converted back to C for my low level tasks. You just gotta love the simplicity of C programming. My jobs consists of reading blobs of binary and throwing it around different buffers in memory (mmap's and dma buffers, etc), so C is a natural choice.

I like how C is fast and dangerous, there's no silly security layers (like Java) and it lets the operating system do it's job. Fast stack allocs for temporary data are great but deadly if you fuck up.

Coding in C is like carrying a loaded gun pointed at your feet. You have to handle it with care and responsibility but when you need it, you can shoot away any extra limbs that get in the way and show 'em who's the boss.

uhhyeahdude8• 14 years ago

<Coding in C is like carrying a loaded gun pointed at your feet.> Could not agree more. Except I would say pointed at someones head, or, perhaps, your own.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Coding in C is like being presented with a grid of buttons of various shades of blue and green. You know to press a specific colour, but it doesn't always do quite what you expect, and half the buttons segfault.

jonsen• 14 years ago

It's always hard to C a loved one Go.

fmkamchatka• 14 years ago

One great advantage of C (which was kind of mentioned in the article) is predictability of the generated code. Compared to a C++ compilers, a C compiler is much simpler. When you write a for loop, even doing something on a struct or some fairly "complicated" object, you have a fairly good idea of the machine code generated. It's also easier to go between the assembly code and the C code generally. In some applications like email or image processing, this can be valuable.

derleth3• 14 years ago

> predictability of the generated code

To some extent, I hope the code that gets generated isn't predictable in the way you mean: I want the compiler to know all of the obscure ways to make string operations go faster by using SIMD hardware, for example. I want that kind of deep low-level knowledge to be encoded into the optimization passes because I don't know it and I likely never will. Isn't that why we have optimization passes to begin with?

michaelochurch2• 14 years ago

I've never heard anyone informed bash C. C++ and Java, yes, but not C. Even people who've never used it tend to know that C has a domain at which (a) it excels, and (b) it's really the only credible option.

There's actually no such thing as a bad language. I enjoy language wars as much as anyone else, but languages are only good or bad relative to the type of problem they're being used for.

For example, what makes C++ and Java odious is that people try to use them for inappropriate purposes. They aren't platonically "evil" languages, and they weren't designed by stupid people; they're just inappropriate for over 90 percent of what modern programmers have to do in their professional lives. When people need high-level features and don't have them, they tend to roll their own-- badly. This is Greenspun's Tenth Rule and the heart of those god-awful "design patterns".

C++ and Java, for all that, also have domains in which they're the appropriate languages to use. They're just very small.

swah• 14 years ago

The conclusion to this is that in bigger projects you should use multi-language solutions... which many people don't like.

loup-vaillant• 14 years ago

Does anybody here have an idea why? I have heard reasons ("interfacing languages is a mess" and "you'd have to learn several languages" being the main ones), but none I found compelling (especially when the alternative is C++).

If it's irrational to reject multi-language solutions (I believe it is), why do people keep doing it?

machia• 14 years ago

Couple of old projects (ha sw top on linux) that I've worked the soultion was using C and Python. C for the system stuff and Python for the CLI-part. Which worked quite nicely on that division. My personal taste would have been to use Python a bit more, but the division was 'set to stone' at the start of the project and some managers were inclined to change it.

to3m3• 14 years ago

Most of us who dislike C tend to keep quiet about it, because we know we'll never hear the end of it.

sausagefeet2• 14 years ago

I think the difference is, most people recognize that there is a place where C is really your only choice. Maybe you need a little shim code to interact with a shared object in another language from ML or something. It's harder to argue that for C++ or Java.

ufo• 14 years ago

However, C is not suitable for all purposes and it would be nice if people bashed it a little bit more. For example, it is a very common as an introductory CS101 first programming language here in Brazil even though it is full of traps for begginers and has some severe limits in expressive power (most notably, manual memory allocation really gets in the way)

smoyer2• 14 years ago

My son's CS101 class at Penn State was based on C++ and supposedly taught OOD/OOP. But the instructor only focused on syntax and there were vast portions of the whole class system missing from the course.

I think it's probably a mistake to teach OOD/OOP in an introductory course and would rather see types, assignment, flow-control, etc. covered in a thorough manner. As it was, he ended up with big gaps in his general knowledge.

Jach5• 14 years ago

Here's your informed person bashing C: http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/HateC.html (Disclaimer: I like C more than C++, though I can't say I love either of them.)

I do think there are bad languages. Brainfuck is terrible. Maybe there are no bad serious languages, but you'll have to define what you mean by serious, and you'll have to argue with Dijkstra's ghost when it comes to COBOL et al. (though I think he would have liked J). (His two famous quotes against COBOL come from http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html) I don't think good/bad is really the best way to judge languages, I'm more interested in language power, fluidity, and library support.

I'd agree that every language has a purpose, even if the purpose is as simple as making a joke like in the case of LOLCODE, and that people abuse the language beyond its intended purpose. I read somewhere someone asserting "Design patterns are missing language features" and I more-or-less agree with that.

Someone2• 14 years ago

Why would he have liked J? I do not see how he would describe it differently from "a mistake, carried through past perfection". Also, slightly related: he may not have seen J, but http://www.dijkstrascry.com/node/90 shows that he can not have been totally unfamiliar with APL developments.

btilly• 14 years ago

Maybe there are no bad serious languages...

How well do you know PHP?

merlincorey• 14 years ago

  I do think there are bad languages. Brainfuck is terrible.

Brainfuck is not terrible, it's just not easy on human eyes. Brainfuck is really a very simple 8 instruction turing machine designed to have the smallest possible compiler on the Amiga (240 bytes, at that). It is actually a derivation of p'', which is a programming language from the 60s used to describe a family of turing machines.

Now, for a truly terrible language, I introduce you the only programming language named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno...

  @@@@@@@@@@    @@@@@@   @@@       @@@@@@@    @@@@@@   @@@        @@@@@@@@  @@@@@@@@  
  @@@@@@@@@@@  @@@@@@@@  @@@       @@@@@@@@  @@@@@@@@  @@@       @@@@@@@@@  @@@@@@@@  
  @@! @@! @@!  @@!  @@@  @@!       @@!  @@@  @@!  @@@  @@!       !@@        @@!       
  !@! !@! !@!  !@!  @!@  !@!       !@   @!@  !@!  @!@  !@!       !@!        !@!       
  @!! !!@ @!@  @!@!@!@!  @!!       @!@!@!@   @!@  !@!  @!!       !@! @!@!@  @!!!:!    
  !@!   ! !@!  !!!@!!!!  !!!       !!!@!!!!  !@!  !!!  !!!       !!! !!@!!  !!!!!:    
  !!:     !!:  !!:  !!!  !!:       !!:  !!!  !!:  !!!  !!:       :!!   !!:  !!:       
  :!:     :!:  :!:  !:!   :!:      :!:  !:!  :!:  !:!   :!:      :!:   !::  :!:       
  :::     ::   ::   :::   :: ::::   :: ::::  ::::: ::   :: ::::   ::: ::::   :: ::::  
   :      :     :   : :  : :: : :  :: : ::    : :  :   : :: : :   :: :: :   : :: ::

EsoLangs wiki entry: http://esolangs.org/wiki/Malbolge 99 Bottles: http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-malbolge-995.html

Writing programs in Malbolge is so difficult, typically one has to use another language to generate programs and search for a working malbolge program, or make extremely large programs that go on for pages.

You have been warned!

fghh45sdfhr3• 14 years ago

I think C being a practical joke was one of the oldest unix culture "jokes".

rm445• 14 years ago

C needn't be the only credible option in its domain forever.

There is another axis of 'badness', other than suitability for the problem domain. C's main problem is features that look fine but might subtly invoke wrong behaviour - the infamous traps and pitfalls.

If you can accept this view, then there /can/ be such a thing as a bad language, and it can be possible for two languages to suit the same domain and one to be better than the other. The domain that C serves well is not going away (though it might shrink, as more suitable tools are used for things like compiler-writing), but a better langauge for the domain could come along in the end.

pnathan3• 14 years ago

I really flipping "hate" C. It's used for everything in Linux it seems like. Things that really ought to be high level turn out to be a libfoo.so, requiring a C compiler.

It's not a gui programming language. It's not a text-handling programming language. It's not a symbolic programming language.

But it's used as those, constantly.

Pointer-based errors are endemic to C; they ought to be an expected part of the language usage by now. There are reasons why static analysis tools such as Klocwork are out there, and are very expensive... and keep being bought. Because C is bad for an incredibly large range of tasks that it keeps getting used for. I've done some of that, and using C (or C++) made things harder and more error-prone.

It's also very good at other tasks... like writing OS kernels or drivers. I've done some of that, and C made it possible.

Although at this point, I'd be interested to give writing an OS in D a spin to see how it works.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Do you hate C? Or do you hate the way it is overused in Linux?

B-Con• 14 years ago

> I really flipping "hate" C. It's used for everything in Linux it seems like. Things that really ought to be high level turn out to be a libfoo.so, requiring a C compiler.

I'm confused by what you mean. What is this "higher level" that functionality should exist at that is above libfoo.so?

va_coder• 14 years ago

People who love C love it, in part, because they are often solving interesting problems with it. Many problems that require C are interesting: embedded software, automated robots, new databases etc. Most problems that C is not good at - Web development - are not that interesting to many people that love C.

puivert• 14 years ago

None of those require C, and are frequently done using high level languages.

Jach5• 14 years ago

Your comment may have gone over better if you included specific examples. For one, here's a story about Lisping at the Jet Propulsion Lab: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

tosseraccount2• 14 years ago

C is not good at web development? Most of the "web" stack is written in C: OS/NGINX/apache/php/java/perl. If you do write the top of the stack in C, it will run faster than anything else and be smaller. This means lower turnaround time which is VERY IMPORTANT in web apps. C, in many cases, is the best Web language.

sgk284• 14 years ago

In what world does runtime speed and compiled size have anything to do with turnaround (or programmer productivity, as I read it)?

C is a great language for many reasons, but let's not conflate benefits.

splicer2• 14 years ago

I wrote a CGI in C around 2005. The C code produced only a small about of XML. All the presentation layers were done using client-side XSLT, CSS, and a bit of javascript. The result was very portable and efficient: we had to support serving from z/OS mainframes that used EBCDIC, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows.

cema• 14 years ago

C is well placed in that sweet spot close to the hardware where the abstractions are good enough to hide the hardware specifics from the programmer and good enough to build more advanced abstractions with sufficient efficiency.

Because it is so close to the lower levels of abstractions, it ended up a compact and concise language, easy to keep in mind. This (among other things) led to C being the quintessential language for some segments of "computer science": maybe not so much directly but as a reference model.

argv_empty• 14 years ago

Guaranteed simple flow

And then there's setjmp/longjmp.

Clear and unambiguous

Aside from all the undefined and implementation-defined behavior.

A macro preprocessor

Which just does plain, dumb text substitution with no understanding of program syntax (or the environment where the expanded macro will appear!). CPP's macro system is a pretty leaky abstraction.

The other points are why I use C (when I use C), but I wouldn't make these three arguments in favor of C.

wmil• 14 years ago

What I don't like about C: it's 2012, strings should be easy. Instead they are a source of bugs and security vulnerabilities.

mccoyst• 14 years ago

The preprocessor, and conditional compilation especially, are not something to love about C. That is probably one of C's most hateful, code-goop enabling capabilities.

regularfry• 14 years ago

Ugh. Just today I've had to clean up a problem where a function was called without enough parameters, but because the compile-and-link step included just the right components, there was neither a warning nor an error. Not only that, but because of a coincidence on the stack (the missing parameter was a NULL, which just so happened to be lying around), the relevant unit tests actually passed.

The problem with C is that, for all its simplicity, there's a ton of voodoo which you've got to "just know", and the best practices are not at all clear from what the language makes easy. In fact, the language makes it easy to make mistakes and difficult to find them.

I wish Go had made GC optional, I really do.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

I think the most dangerous part of C is that many people assume C is perfectly efficient. It's as if C was the "100%" of performance and other languages are converging towards it as they get better.

But I don't see how this is true. Pointer aliasing is the biggest example probably:

http://www.futurechips.org/tips-for-power-coders/how-to-tric...

And then there is the huge abstraction penalty for things like `qsort()` where C++ is actually way ahead of C.

cheatercheater2• 14 years ago

> Access to the hardware

Yeah, C is close to the metal. But only on a PDP-11, the assembly language of which C was conceived to integrate with.

orthecreedence• 14 years ago

One thing I LOVE about C is that it's so easy to create APIs that other languages can use. For instance, if a C library exposes a good API, you can call it from lisp quite easily with CFFI. This gives you a large advantage: the low level, raw speed of a C library paired with the high-level forms of whatever language you choose.

I'm all for people writing programs/apps in C++, but I kind of cringe when I see a library in C++ because it's a harder language to wrap around.

farinasa• 14 years ago

No. ...wait

wtf2012a• 14 years ago

In embedded product development, C and C++ is King.

What’s to love about C?

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