Comment by uecker
7 hours ago
Advantages of C are short compilation time, portability, long-term stability, widely available expertise and training materials, less complexity.
IMHO you can today deal with UB just fine in C if you want to by following best practices, and the reasons given when those are not followed would also rule out use of most other safer languages.
This is a pet peeve, so forgive me: C is not portable in practice. Almost every C program and library that does anything interesting has to be manually ported to every platform.
C is portable in the least interesting way, namely that compilers exist for all architectures. But that's where it stops.
> C is not portable in practice. Almost every C program and library that does anything interesting has to be manually ported to every platform.
I'm guessing you mean that every cross-platform C codebase ends up being plastered in cascading preprocessor code to deal with OS and architecture differences. Sure that's true, you still have to do some porting work regardless of the language you chose.
But honestly, is there any language more portable than C? I struggle to come up with one.
If someone told me "I need a performant language that targets all major architectures and operating systems, but also maybe I want to run it on DOS, S390X, an old Amiga I have in my closet, and any mystery-meat microcontroller I can find." then really wouldn't have a better answer for them than C89.
If C isn't portable then nothing is.
If "portability" to you has to include incredibly esoteric architectures in 2025, then what C has to offer is probably the best you can do, but my point is it doesn't do any better on mainstream platforms either.
If you are targeting any recent platform, both Rust and Zig do what you want.
Back in the 2000's I had lots of fun porting code across several UNIX systems, Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Red-Hat Linux.
A decade earlier I also used Xenix and DG/UX.
That is a nice way to learn how "portable" C happens to be, even between UNIX systems, its birthplace.
Compilers existing is essential and not trivial (and also usually then what other languages build on). The conformance model of C also allows you to write programs that are portable without change to different platforms. This is possible, my software runs on 20 different architectures without change. That one can then also adopt it to make use of specific features of different platforms is quite natural in my opinion.
It is essential and nontrivial, but it's also the extremely bare minimum.
You cannot write portable code without platform-specific and even environment-specific adaptations, like handling the presence of certain headers (looking at you, stdint.h and stddef.h), and let's not even start about interacting with the OS in any way.
> short compilation time
> IMHO you can today deal with UB just fine in C if you want to by following best practices
In the other words, short compilation time has been traded off with wetware brainwashing... well, adjustment time, which makes the supposed advantage much less desirable. It is still an advantage, I reckon though.
I do not understand what you are tying to say, but it seems to be some hostile rambling.
Never meant to be hostile (if I indeed were, I would have question every single word), but sorry for that.
I mean to say that best practices do help much but learning those best practices take much time as well. So short compilation time is easily offseted by learning time, and C was not even designed to optimize compilation time anyway (C headers can take a lot to parse and discard even when unused!). Your other points do make much more sense and it's unfortunate that first points are destructively interfering each other, hence my comment.
1 reply →