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It would have been a nice article but there's just too much ridiculous hype in it. I'm not saying C is a shitty language or anything, but the reality is that t

by illuminati1911 10y ago

It would have been a nice article but there's just too much ridiculous hype in it. I'm not saying C is a shitty language or anything, but the reality is that the only reason why C is still around is the long history it has and the dominant position it used to have.

shaklee3 10y ago
Not really. With the exception of rust, you can't match the speed of C short of writing assembly. When you start a project you must decide what is important to you, and if speed is the number one issue, topically you use C. Many, many new projects start with C, mainly because so many of the fast libraries are written in C.
- goatlover 10y ago
  Fortran, Ada, D? I guess D is out because of the garbage collector, and I've not heard of Fortran being used as a systems language, but it's certainly performant with C. However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant.
  - catdog 10y ago
    > However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant. The right abstractions even increase the possibilities for optimization a lot, not hinder it. The fact that C is fast and often faster than others is simply due to its decades lasting popularity and the work which was put into compilers over the time.
  - shaklee3 10y ago
    Those are fair points, but I was mostly focusing on languages that are still widely used. Fortan seems to be used the most of the three, and I rarely see it outside of niche scientific applications.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant. You can use anything for writing an OS or an embedded program, if you expand the scope of what people consider an OS or an embedded program. While OSes have been written in Lisp, no mainstream OS people actually use has. Experimental research OSes don't really count. People have written such things in all kinds of languages, even Java. And while you can use whatever language for "embedded" programming, actual in-the-trenches embedded programming is done mostly in C, in chips and specs where those other languages wouldn't really fit or be performant enough.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      > if you expand the scope of what people consider an OS You mean expand it beyond "currently mainstream OS with a big installed base" rather than in any technical sense. > While OSes have been written in Lisp, no mainstream OS people actually use has. Experimental research OSes don't really count. People have written such things in all kinds of languages, even Java. Lisp machines were shipping production hardware. Who has shipped hardware programmed in nothing but Java? Java code taking interrupts, programming DMA controllers, managing memory, etc.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >You mean expand it beyond "currently mainstream OS with a big installed base" rather than in any technical sense. Well, the technical sense ("to boot some hardware and coordinate some processes") is too low a barrier. It's all the other stuff, managing memory efficiently, making the most of software, being fast to make it worthy to run it, making the battery last, etc, being a good server, etc, that make an OS an OS and not a research vehicle/toy/expensive niche workstation (like the LISP machines).
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        kazinator 10y ago
  - kaleidic 10y ago
    You can write D without using the garbage collector, or more pragmatically disable it or have threads doing work that are not registered with the GC. Some standard library functions require the GC, but a diminishing number, and you are no worse off than writing pure C. Just stick @nogc on the relevant code and it won't compile if you use the GC by mistake. Also, D generates less garbage than some other languages when written idiomatically, as you pass structs on the stack.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  If you've already worked out the algorithm, it will be difficult to improve upon C unless you write in assembly language. However, if you haven't, you'll be able to write and debug it a lot faster by writing it in Java, Python, Lisp, or some other high level language instead. Most, and larger, performance improvements are obtained through discovering better algorithms, and you'll find it easier, and have more time, if you write it in a high level language, because you won't have to worry about manual memory management, array overflows, and all the other problems you often run into when programming in C. So after development time constraints are taken into account, many programs in higher level languages will often run faster than equivalent C programs. The things that matter most are development and maintenance time, and response times, not overall run time. Compared to high level languages, C increases the first two and has little effect upon the third. Decades ago, people were happily using computers thousands of times slower.
ajross 10y ago
That's an awfully big "only" there... Basically you're saying that C is still winning because of the historically unmatched ecosystem of tooling and libraries and platforms and technologies and research areas, and the attendant uncounted millions of developer minds who are expert in all of that. Well, yeah. It's not enough for rust (I'm assuming this is all about rust, but you can insert your own favorite and the argument still holds) to be a better language to have done all this stuff in. It needs to be the technology in which it was actually done. Get crackin', basically.
coldtea 10y ago
>the reality is that the only reason why C is still around is the long history it has and the dominant position it used to have. Those are not idle historical reasons. They actively translate in important benefits that other languages lack. Like multiple vendor support, fast compilers, great tooling, editor/IDE support, numerous libs, easy cross platform portability, good documentation, lots of available work, and lots of other things besides. Even if Rust is a safer/better C/C++, for example, it still lacks most of this things. It's a single vendor language, tied to LLVM (with whatever this implies for the platforms it supports), it has lacking tooling and support, etc.

shaklee3 10y ago

Not really. With the exception of rust, you can't match the speed of C short of writing assembly. When you start a project you must decide what is important to you, and if speed is the number one issue, topically you use C. Many, many new projects start with C, mainly because so many of the fast libraries are written in C.

goatlover 10y ago
Fortran, Ada, D? I guess D is out because of the garbage collector, and I've not heard of Fortran being used as a systems language, but it's certainly performant with C. However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant.
- catdog 10y ago
  > However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant. The right abstractions even increase the possibilities for optimization a lot, not hinder it. The fact that C is fast and often faster than others is simply due to its decades lasting popularity and the work which was put into compilers over the time.
- shaklee3 10y ago
  Those are fair points, but I was mostly focusing on languages that are still widely used. Fortan seems to be used the most of the three, and I rarely see it outside of niche scientific applications.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >However, OSes have been written in Lisp, and it has been used for embedded programming, so it's possible to make a language with more abstractions available similarly performant. You can use anything for writing an OS or an embedded program, if you expand the scope of what people consider an OS or an embedded program. While OSes have been written in Lisp, no mainstream OS people actually use has. Experimental research OSes don't really count. People have written such things in all kinds of languages, even Java. And while you can use whatever language for "embedded" programming, actual in-the-trenches embedded programming is done mostly in C, in chips and specs where those other languages wouldn't really fit or be performant enough.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    > if you expand the scope of what people consider an OS You mean expand it beyond "currently mainstream OS with a big installed base" rather than in any technical sense. > While OSes have been written in Lisp, no mainstream OS people actually use has. Experimental research OSes don't really count. People have written such things in all kinds of languages, even Java. Lisp machines were shipping production hardware. Who has shipped hardware programmed in nothing but Java? Java code taking interrupts, programming DMA controllers, managing memory, etc.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >You mean expand it beyond "currently mainstream OS with a big installed base" rather than in any technical sense. Well, the technical sense ("to boot some hardware and coordinate some processes") is too low a barrier. It's all the other stuff, managing memory efficiently, making the most of software, being fast to make it worthy to run it, making the battery last, etc, being a good server, etc, that make an OS an OS and not a research vehicle/toy/expensive niche workstation (like the LISP machines).
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - kazinator 10y ago
- kaleidic 10y ago
  You can write D without using the garbage collector, or more pragmatically disable it or have threads doing work that are not registered with the GC. Some standard library functions require the GC, but a diminishing number, and you are no worse off than writing pure C. Just stick @nogc on the relevant code and it won't compile if you use the GC by mistake. Also, D generates less garbage than some other languages when written idiomatically, as you pass structs on the stack.
DonaldFisk 10y ago
If you've already worked out the algorithm, it will be difficult to improve upon C unless you write in assembly language. However, if you haven't, you'll be able to write and debug it a lot faster by writing it in Java, Python, Lisp, or some other high level language instead. Most, and larger, performance improvements are obtained through discovering better algorithms, and you'll find it easier, and have more time, if you write it in a high level language, because you won't have to worry about manual memory management, array overflows, and all the other problems you often run into when programming in C. So after development time constraints are taken into account, many programs in higher level languages will often run faster than equivalent C programs. The things that matter most are development and maintenance time, and response times, not overall run time. Compared to high level languages, C increases the first two and has little effect upon the third. Decades ago, people were happily using computers thousands of times slower.

ajross 10y ago

That's an awfully big "only" there... Basically you're saying that C is still winning because of the historically unmatched ecosystem of tooling and libraries and platforms and technologies and research areas, and the attendant uncounted millions of developer minds who are expert in all of that. Well, yeah. It's not enough for rust (I'm assuming this is all about rust, but you can insert your own favorite and the argument still holds) to be a better language to have done all this stuff in. It needs to be the technology in which it was actually done. Get crackin', basically.

coldtea 10y ago

>the reality is that the only reason why C is still around is the long history it has and the dominant position it used to have. Those are not idle historical reasons. They actively translate in important benefits that other languages lack. Like multiple vendor support, fast compilers, great tooling, editor/IDE support, numerous libs, easy cross platform portability, good documentation, lots of available work, and lots of other things besides. Even if Rust is a safer/better C/C++, for example, it still lacks most of this things. It's a single vendor language, tied to LLVM (with whatever this implies for the platforms it supports), it has lacking tooling and support, etc.