Comment by PaulRobinson
1 year ago
Perhaps I've just been looking more (because I've been going back to the books to pick up C again after a 20 year absence for a side project), but it feels like in recent years there has been a little uptick in people appreciating the level of control C provides, and "going back to basics".
I think the work on C23 (which would have still been C2x when this article was written), means people are starting to want to see innovation in the language again. I don't think that would have happened without Go and Rust showing some great thinking, but it's interesting that it's happening at all.
Tail calls are an interesting idea, and now I want to know more about both this extension, and also how to write my code in such a way as to help a compiler optimize for tail calls even when this extension isn't present. This somehow feels more fun to me than writing more Python or Ruby...
C is great for its basics, but at some level, when you gain awareness of all of your unpunished pointer lifetime sins and how annoying the lack of basic data structures is in stdlib, then you realize that biting the bullet and learning something like Rust is the way to go. Maybe a better stdlib would help, but I've found that the pain of becoming proficient in Rust has paid back multiples over the continual toil of doing certain repetitive tasks in C.
It is not terribly hard to find some library for data structures in C. What I do not like about Rust is: syntax, complexity, long compile times, cargo, ...
> it feels like in recent years there has been a little uptick in people appreciating the level of control C provides, and "going back to basics".
I don't write C, and maybe it's because I somehow seek out these types of article and projects, but I'd agree, I'm seeing the same thing. It might be a backlash against programming languages like Rust or even JavaScript. Rust being really complicated, but clearly safer, and JavaScript... well it's just really hard to set up a development environment and the tooling is almost more predominant than the language itself.
While I don't write C myself, only for fun, I can see many just reverting to it, because it's "right there", it's fast, the language is fairly simple, even if the standard library is anything but simple, but you can take the stuff you need an ignore the rest.
I've personally been very motivated to learn C (coming from Go) by witnessing @jart's[1] progress on Cosmopolitan[2] and Readbean[3]. Writing C is almost like an exercise in sovereignty: ultimate freedom (and danger).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117
I think it's fine to go back to C and maybe play around a bit to learn about some of the things that can be done, but I would implore you to bear in mind that the decades have taught us that the "ultimate danger" in question is basically that you're building sand castles in a minefield. We're not talking "oh ha ha I guess I wrote a few more bugs that a stronger type system would have caught", we're talking "oh ha ha I guess remote unauthenticated attackers can run arbitrary assembler as root in my network code because I tripped over one of C's nominally well-known mines that I did not personally know about and all the attackers had to do was slightly tweak one of the exploit scripts already in metasploit to install root kits on my system and add it to their bot net".
The world has gotten a lot more dangerous than people realize. People generally quite correctly assume that hackers aren't going to spend person-months attacking their system personally but don't realize that the attacker tools are quite sophisticated now and they don't have to. Shoving code into a small little buffer overflow to lift to a larger buffer overflow to load exploit code over the network that will run a pre-packaged root priv escalation to install a rootkit to add them to their botnet is no longer the work of a team of hackers for months. It's all off-the-shelf tech now and it's more like writing a 20 line function now; you don't need to attract very much attention now to attract that level of sophistication.
We are leaving C behind collectively for very good reasons. If you are playing with C and you do not intimately understand those reasons, you're going to relearn them the hard way.
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jart is the best thing to happen to C since K&R.
The great thinking exists since Modula-2 and Ada, the only issue was that most people weren't interested in safer systems programming, now that money is attached to every CVE fix, and C isn't going away in our lifetimes, naturally there needs to exist a way to improve what is already there.
C is great and I definitely recommend learning it & becoming proficient in it. I don't think I would recommend it for a new project, for all the reasons jerf mentions in a sibling comment[1]. But there's a ton of existing code out there, and I think it provides a nice little peek into what the hardware is actually doing that you don't get from higher level languages.
> I think the work on C23 means people are starting to want to see innovation in the language again.
I have to admit this makes me nervous. Part of what's nice about C is its simplicity and its stability. It's relatively easy to write a compiler, and the lack of having many different ways to do the same thing means all code written in C tends to "feel" roughly the same (outside some domain-specific areas), which means it's easy to dive into a new codebase and get up to speed. It's basically all structs & functions and abstractions built upon them. That's it.
While I definitely am not opposed to making improvements to the C spec, seeing the inline anonymous functions in a proposal linked elsewhere in this thread[2] really turns me off. It starts to feel like the hideous mess that C++ has turned into, with oodles of implicit behavior, un-greppable code, generated symbol names leading to compiler error hell, and a thousand different colors for your bike shed.
We already have languages that can do all this stuff. I welcome making changes to C to make it nicer to program in C, but I'm wary of proposals that turn C into yet another messy kitchen sink programming language. Let's keep it clean, obvious, and simple, please.
[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3266.htm#u...
Easy, the direction WG14 is going for, is "C++ without classes, templates, improved memory safety".
Already there you can guess what features are on WG14 roadmap without going to the ISO mailings.
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C is not a dead language to literally millions of other programmers and the billions of ongoing practical applications of it.
If your threshold for a language's alive-ness is the presence or absence of a package manager, you should reevaluate.
1. I don't think the presence of centralized package management makes or breaks a language for most people.
2. Your platform's package manager should have plenty of C packages.
I think the success of Javascript and Rust certainly tests your biases.
I can say anecdotally that the lack of a standard package manager in C and C++ kept me from exploring those languages.
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