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Fascinating. I would’ve thought most commercial C programs would have heavily used linked lists, hashes (dictionary), and binary search trees all over the place

Fascinating. I would’ve thought most commercial C programs would have heavily used linked lists, hashes (dictionary), and binary search trees all over the place. I assume most C++ programs heavily use more of these advanced data structures, correct?

wink 6y ago
You can't really compare C with a C++ stdlib or boost, or Qt. Well, some organizations surely have their own repo of debugged, tested, and optimized stuff but I guess a lot of them roll everything on their own again and again - and in C++ there is a rich ecosystem, at least for basic data structures.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  The other thing that C++ and Rust have for collections and algorithms is that they follow a standard pattern. Because of that, it is usually pretty easy to substitute an optimized algorithm or a container for another one with minimal code changes. In C, because there is no standard for how to do containers and algorithms, it is likely that every library does something a little different in terms of conventions making it harder to swap in implementations.
Skunkleton 6y ago
> I would’ve thought most commercial C programs would have heavily used linked lists, hashes (dictionary), and binary search trees all over the place. Every large scale C code base I have worked on has had these things, and they were used as you say all over the place. If I were to encounter a code base that didn't have these things I would wonder why it was written in C in the first place.
- Leherenn 6y ago
  Conversely, I have only seen arrays being used, and never linked lists/hash maps in the few embedded code bases I have worked on.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    And I have run across, and implemented, both linked lists, and arrays, in embedded systems. The implementation depended on what made the most sense for the particular problem being addressed.
jeltz 6y ago
Heavy use of linked lists is one reason for why commercial C code often is slow. While there are some exceptions linked lists are slower than arrays for most things. Linked lists are easy to implement in C and therefore used a lot.

wink 6y ago

You can't really compare C with a C++ stdlib or boost, or Qt. Well, some organizations surely have their own repo of debugged, tested, and optimized stuff but I guess a lot of them roll everything on their own again and again - and in C++ there is a rich ecosystem, at least for basic data structures.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The other thing that C++ and Rust have for collections and algorithms is that they follow a standard pattern. Because of that, it is usually pretty easy to substitute an optimized algorithm or a container for another one with minimal code changes. In C, because there is no standard for how to do containers and algorithms, it is likely that every library does something a little different in terms of conventions making it harder to swap in implementations.

Skunkleton 6y ago

> I would’ve thought most commercial C programs would have heavily used linked lists, hashes (dictionary), and binary search trees all over the place. Every large scale C code base I have worked on has had these things, and they were used as you say all over the place. If I were to encounter a code base that didn't have these things I would wonder why it was written in C in the first place.

Leherenn 6y ago
Conversely, I have only seen arrays being used, and never linked lists/hash maps in the few embedded code bases I have worked on.
- greyhair 6y ago
  And I have run across, and implemented, both linked lists, and arrays, in embedded systems. The implementation depended on what made the most sense for the particular problem being addressed.

jeltz 6y ago

Heavy use of linked lists is one reason for why commercial C code often is slow. While there are some exceptions linked lists are slower than arrays for most things. Linked lists are easy to implement in C and therefore used a lot.