2 ms·

"In the spirit of C". What exactly is meant by that?

• arcticbull 7y ago
  The spirit of chainsaws with no hand guards haha. But actually, to me that means a thin, light API with a couple of functions and some macros. Does what it needs to do, no more. Error handling is basic if even provided, usually via return of numerical error codes.
  • codr7 7y ago
    That's correct, it does mostly what you tell it to and stays out of the way. If you want error checking beyond the test suite you have to do it yourself. The issues people have with C comes mostly from treating it like any other language. C is all about control and flexibility. Further, special care is taken to reduce the number of allocations, often using pools/slab allocators. And value semantics, or rather byte array semantics, which means items are treated as blocks of N bytes rather than pointers/references.