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In college (over 10 years ago) I used to think C was very viable. Sure it took longer to develop but the reward was fast execution and generally KISS like code

by agentgt 10y ago

In college (over 10 years ago) I used to think C was very viable. Sure it took longer to develop but the reward was fast execution and generally KISS like code (just an anecdotal observation I have of C is the tedium to write complex things forces simpler solutions... I mean who wants to malloc over and over). But near the end of college I had to write code using pthreads. It was awful. It was exceedingly painful. Banging on the keyboard cussing continuously painful. Maybe it was just pthreads (I'm sure there are nicer libraries) or my stupidity but that exercise killed my mild liking of C. Languages I like are heavily expression based but don't require braces (algol like languages) nor parenthesis (lisp like). As much I dislike braces and parenthesis (for blocks) I despise statement heavy languages more (sadly python). I wish the article of the "Stop Copying C" mentioned that (or maybe I only share that opinion).

module0000 10y ago
> But near the end of college I had to write code using pthreads. It was awful. For what it's worth, I don't think it's C's pthread library that is painful, but POSIX threading in general. Languages and libraries try to "simplify" threading by re-inventing pthreads. Eg: python's 'threading' module, erlang in general, java 'runnable' interface, golang's 'coroutine' thread manager...etc. The difference between all those languages specific threading implementation and POSIX threads, are that POSIX threads work across every language, and all those implementations are only relevant to the language itself. Working with "one size fits all"(pthread) tools is inherently more complex than a simplified tool specific to one language. Summary: once you learn POSIX threading [well] in C, using other pthread abstractions in other languages becomes much easier.
- agentgt 10y ago
  If I recall it wasn't that I didn't understand the concepts but rather difficulty in debugging. At the time I was ignorant and ill experienced of proper tooling. Today when dealing with C I would probably not even bother with using threads and might just use multiple processes. I agree on the reimplementing POSIX threading and despite my rough experience pthreads was worthwhile learning about.
username223 10y ago
Don't blame C for the pain of using Pthreads. Pthreads is a low-level, fiddly library for shared-memory concurrency. Sometimes it's necessary, but often there's an easier model for using multiple cores (data parallelism via OpenMP) or dealing with asynchronous events (some sort of message-passing).

by agentgt 10y ago

module0000 10y ago

> But near the end of college I had to write code using pthreads. It was awful. For what it's worth, I don't think it's C's pthread library that is painful, but POSIX threading in general. Languages and libraries try to "simplify" threading by re-inventing pthreads. Eg: python's 'threading' module, erlang in general, java 'runnable' interface, golang's 'coroutine' thread manager...etc. The difference between all those languages specific threading implementation and POSIX threads, are that POSIX threads work across every language, and all those implementations are only relevant to the language itself. Working with "one size fits all"(pthread) tools is inherently more complex than a simplified tool specific to one language. Summary: once you learn POSIX threading [well] in C, using other pthread abstractions in other languages becomes much easier.

agentgt 10y ago
If I recall it wasn't that I didn't understand the concepts but rather difficulty in debugging. At the time I was ignorant and ill experienced of proper tooling. Today when dealing with C I would probably not even bother with using threads and might just use multiple processes. I agree on the reimplementing POSIX threading and despite my rough experience pthreads was worthwhile learning about.

username223 10y ago

Don't blame C for the pain of using Pthreads. Pthreads is a low-level, fiddly library for shared-memory concurrency. Sometimes it's necessary, but often there's an easier model for using multiple cores (data parallelism via OpenMP) or dealing with asynchronous events (some sort of message-passing).