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It's been 11 years, and C is running on more hardware than it ever has before, viz every android device. By what measure would C be losing ground?
by konjin 6y ago
It's been 11 years, and C is running on more hardware than it ever has before, viz every android device.
By what measure would C be losing ground?
- munificent 6y agoThe relevant metric would be what fraction of hardware it's running on.
- konjin 6y agoLiterally all of it.
- xmprt 6y agoIs the number of devices that C is running on a good metric? I think the number of developers or number of projects using C makes more sense to track. And then get the market share. If there are 10x more devices today than 10 years ago then I'd sure hope C was running on more devices but anything less than 10x means C is losing ground.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago> By what measure would C be losing ground? When we start seeing Rust or similar being used instead of C would be a good metric and / or major OS development.
- pjmlp 6y agoLike C++ on Windows, Arduino, ARM mbed, macOS,...
- AlphaSite 6y agoLinux is currently investigating using Rust in drivers (The main issue being lack of compiler support for the more isoteric architectures).
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoThank you for the new knowledge that "eso" is pronounced similar to "iso" in some dialects of English, I didn't know that. However, the word "isoteric" is more correctly spelled (in non-phonetic spelling) as esoteric. The prefix "eso-" means "inside" in Greek, as in "esothermic", or "esophagus". The prefix "iso-" means "equal", as in "isomorphism", "isosceles", "isometric", etc.
- hanche 6y agoMaybe dial back the sarcasm a notch or two?
- extempore 6y agoHe wasn’t being sarcastic.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoHe, who? :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chongli 6y agoI’m pretty sure they’re a native speaker of Greek, given their name on GitHub.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoMany apologies - I was not being sarcastic and I'm sorry that this is how my comment came across. As chongli says I'm a native speaker of Greek and I really didn't know how "eso" is pronounced by native English speakers. I've lived for 15 years in the UK and I'm still surprised to hear how people pronounce the more obscure words in their language (some of which come from Greek).
- sriku 6y agoC doesn't "run on hardware" .. unless you're talking interpreted C. Of course compiled machine code is running on more hardware but that's just a truism. The question is are people using C to program these hardware more? .. or are people gravitating towards safer compiled languages (Rust?). That's a valid question, even if the answer is "no C's usage is only increasing."
- saagarjha 6y agoYou’re being pedantic to the point of being actively misleading.
- raverbashing 6y agoBy number of new projects using it (without counting legacy code) Nobody would do a project in C today with Go/Rust/C++ etc unless it's for a very specific situation
- the_hoser 6y agoCareful with generalizations like that. You're forgetting the most important reason anyone uses a language: It's the one they know. A C programmer isn't automatically going to switch to Rust for new projects that they would use C for, unless their goal is to use Rust.
- tonyarkles 6y agoLol C programmer since 1994 here... just started a Rust project with the specific goal of learning Rust. The project itself is just to scratch my own itch. I’d honestly probably write it in Python if I didn’t want to see what Rust was all about :)
- baylessj 6y agoC is also used a lot in embedded environments where the hardware won't support languages with a larger footprint. Quite common in my line of work.
- ayende 6y agoI started a project this year, I write it in C.
- pjmlp 6y agoThe pyrrhic victory, other than the Linux kernel, everything else is a mix of C++ and Java, with a native compiler written in C++. And the history of Linux kernel and Android might come to an end if Zirkon ever replaces it, then it will be no more C on Android.
- mytherin 6y agoThe same is likely true of Fortran, since Fortran code is shipped around with several Python data science libraries and included in R. Does that mean Fortran is a thriving language, or does it just mean Fortran was used a long time ago to write some important libraries that are now hard to get rid of?
- pjmlp 6y agoExcept Fortran 2018 is quite modern, supports modules, generics, and even OOP, first class support on CUDA alongside C++, whereas C18 hardly changed since C89 besides some cosmetic stuff and it is as secure as when it got used to rewrite UNIX in the early 70s.
- estebank 6y agoIt could be argued though that less usage means fewer stake holders to convince of the need for specific changes to the language, which helps with increased evolution. (I have only cursory knowledge of what's happening in C and none about what's happening in Pascal nowadays, just pointing out that being a smaller community might ironically help the language).