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One of the reasons why I switched from C++ to C professionally (I do C for living) was build times: previously kind of big casual game took 5-10 minutes to comp

One of the reasons why I switched from C++ to C professionally (I do C for living) was build times: previously kind of big casual game took 5-10 minutes to compile and around 10-20 sec incremental build, and now my C project takes 5 second to compile from scratch and around 1 second to do incremental changes. Another reason being that I don't need to waste time discussing and arguing which OOP patterns to use - in C it more or less fixed how you write code. Of course one can go extra mile and reinvent VTable and Dependency Injection, but it feels all foreign to C. So maybe give C a try, it's amazingly fast to compile and link, yet you feel almost at home after C++.

im3w1l 9y ago
How do you cope with the lack of template containers? That's the big thing I miss in C.
- dmytroi 9y ago
  Great question! To make things even more annoying - C doesn't have namespaces. So people are forced to write long names like "my_struct_hash_map_t" everywhere, which makes all modern C code look like wall of text (compare too older style code "mshm_t*a = hmalloc()"). To answer honestly - I'm asking myself very pragmatic question: "do I really need a generic code?" much more often compare to C++. In game development C++ templates were used mostly for math libraries (2d/3d/4d vectors, matrices, etc) and containers (hashmap, lists, etc). If we look closely on math libraries we can make a compromise "just float is enough", and if we make such compromise then everything is simple - one don't need templates for math lib anymore, I'm currently using "gb_math.h" [1] and it works pretty good. Containers on the other hand are more challenging, the key here is to understand "can I make this work with linear (maybe static) array?" - and in most cases yes, then you don't need any containers because just arrays will do. If algorithm specific do require a hashmap or list, well, gonna use what we have: macro! It looks weird, and it is weird, but something like khash.h [2] works fine in production. In reality what it means for me is that I need to spend time making decisions about containers, which is good for game development, as what makes games fun doesn't have any connection to templates. But it also bad for casual non-game related code. I find it much faster to just "hey load this json, do some processing, and save json back" do that in Python than trying to do in C just for sake of C. Ideally namespaces/templates and operator overloading in C would solve all this struggles, but then where C ends and C++ starts? - [1] https://github.com/gingerBill/gb/blob/master/gb_math.h https://github.com/gingerBill/gb/blob/master/gb_math.h - [2] https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/khash.h https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/khash.h
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    There's a bizarre lack of interest in CS in the psychology of usable systems - either for developers or for users - which takes into account practical requirements like cycle time. A lot of CS seems to be story-telling: "This feature makes language X better/worse, because it just does, obviously" with no independent testing or peer review of language productivity and robustness in real work environments.
    - mmirate 9y ago
      Well then, so much for it being Computer Science...
      - alecbenzer 9y ago
        As-is, CS really is much closer to a branch of mathematics than a science.
        andrewflnr 9y ago
        Eh, in a similar way to how theoretical physics is mostly math. Math is the tool you're using, but the assumptions are all based on real-world observations.
        alecbenzer 9y ago
        I don't know about that; real world observations like what?
        andrewflnr 9y ago
        Like observations of what can and can't be computed by physical objects. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that things you prove about Turing machines are proofs about what you can compute in the real world, not just some abstract mathematical model.
      - 9y ago

im3w1l 9y ago

How do you cope with the lack of template containers? That's the big thing I miss in C.

dmytroi 9y ago
Great question! To make things even more annoying - C doesn't have namespaces. So people are forced to write long names like "my_struct_hash_map_t" everywhere, which makes all modern C code look like wall of text (compare too older style code "mshm_t*a = hmalloc()"). To answer honestly - I'm asking myself very pragmatic question: "do I really need a generic code?" much more often compare to C++. In game development C++ templates were used mostly for math libraries (2d/3d/4d vectors, matrices, etc) and containers (hashmap, lists, etc). If we look closely on math libraries we can make a compromise "just float is enough", and if we make such compromise then everything is simple - one don't need templates for math lib anymore, I'm currently using "gb_math.h" [1] and it works pretty good. Containers on the other hand are more challenging, the key here is to understand "can I make this work with linear (maybe static) array?" - and in most cases yes, then you don't need any containers because just arrays will do. If algorithm specific do require a hashmap or list, well, gonna use what we have: macro! It looks weird, and it is weird, but something like khash.h [2] works fine in production. In reality what it means for me is that I need to spend time making decisions about containers, which is good for game development, as what makes games fun doesn't have any connection to templates. But it also bad for casual non-game related code. I find it much faster to just "hey load this json, do some processing, and save json back" do that in Python than trying to do in C just for sake of C. Ideally namespaces/templates and operator overloading in C would solve all this struggles, but then where C ends and C++ starts? - [1] https://github.com/gingerBill/gb/blob/master/gb_math.h https://github.com/gingerBill/gb/blob/master/gb_math.h - [2] https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/khash.h https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/khash.h
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  There's a bizarre lack of interest in CS in the psychology of usable systems - either for developers or for users - which takes into account practical requirements like cycle time. A lot of CS seems to be story-telling: "This feature makes language X better/worse, because it just does, obviously" with no independent testing or peer review of language productivity and robustness in real work environments.
  - mmirate 9y ago
    Well then, so much for it being Computer Science...
    - alecbenzer 9y ago
      As-is, CS really is much closer to a branch of mathematics than a science.
      - andrewflnr 9y ago
        Eh, in a similar way to how theoretical physics is mostly math. Math is the tool you're using, but the assumptions are all based on real-world observations.
        alecbenzer 9y ago
        I don't know about that; real world observations like what?
        andrewflnr 9y ago
        Like observations of what can and can't be computed by physical objects. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that things you prove about Turing machines are proofs about what you can compute in the real world, not just some abstract mathematical model.
    - 9y ago