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It's "All the world's a VAX" in its new form, where you depend on some language/library feature that's actually not in the standard (IIRC alloca and preprocesso
by mhd 10y ago
It's "All the world's a VAX" in its new form, where you depend on some language/library feature that's actually not in the standard (IIRC alloca and preprocessor extensions are common culprits).
And then suddenly you're on a different platform and discover that you can't rely on that -- pretty bad if it's in a central part of your system (like trampolining functions for your toy lisp).
On the other hand, you might run into the same issues if the standard support is sub par. People used to declare K&R-style functions for ages after ANSI was passed, and I wouldn't bet a central part of my system on C99.
- jabot 10y agoSo in your opinion the problem is "only" one of portability to non-gnu systems? I thought the author also implied that GNU was technologically inferior and/or problematic. That would interest me...
- mhd 10y agoProbably the ubiquitous "bloat" issue some die-hard C-heads have. But that's his prerogative, I was just pointing out that the specific context points towards portability issues.
- duck2 10y agoThere is quite a lot of GNU code written in C. However, since gnu is a political umbrella project which does not necessarily value code quality, we see a lot of unnecessary complexity arising from the focus on creating working "free" software and not minding the quality much. Anyone who ever touched GNU autotools will confirm that the bloat issue is real. No need to be a diehard C head.