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> but we will someday look back on it as asbestos and wonder why we kept at it for so damn long. Maybe. But there is good reason for C dominance - it's low lev

by Woodi 5y ago

> but we will someday look back on it as asbestos and wonder why we kept at it for so damn long. Maybe. But there is good reason for C dominance - it's low level and close to systems as in "syscalls and stuff". And we need that level of systems control, not only for max performance but also for not loosing what is available in hw and os. Asm is the other option to have full functionality :) Maybe it's just case of available libraries but still C is curently only one option for feature completness. And on low levels all you have is bytes and bits and calls and that allows to do everything with bits, bytes and calls - Core Wars style - and most of languages try to prevent or easy use of that by cutting possibilities, eg. "goto is so nono !11". And yes, C is not perfect and bullshit even grows, eg. in last years NULL checks are "optimized-out"... C actually should be improved and not fucked up into forced disuse...

oblio 5y ago
> C actually should be improved and not fucked up into forced disuse... It can't, it won't, it isn't. The last major update has C99 and even that was minor from a security point of view. For better or worse, it's frozen.
native_samples 5y ago
C isn't dominant in a lot of areas of software, obviously. As for NSS. It's a pure data manipulation library. Algorithms, data structures, not more. It doesn't need to do syscalls and stuff. There's not much benefit to writing it in C and as we just saw, a lot of downsides. It could have been written in many other languages.
pas 5y ago
Memory is cheap. (But not free of course!) Scala, Kotlin, and Java exist. The HotSpot VM is amazing, its JIT is mindblowing. (Probaly even TS + V8 would do the job for high level stuff.) It's complete nonsense that C is needed for accessing the HW. High level languages can do low-level bibanging just fine. So yes, there's a good reason, but that is inertia. Literally too big to fail, so it keeps on living. Even if we tomorrow outlawed C, drafted people to start rewriting things in a memory-managed language, and so on, it would take decades to get rid of it.

by Woodi 5y ago

oblio 5y ago

> C actually should be improved and not fucked up into forced disuse... It can't, it won't, it isn't. The last major update has C99 and even that was minor from a security point of view. For better or worse, it's frozen.

native_samples 5y ago

C isn't dominant in a lot of areas of software, obviously. As for NSS. It's a pure data manipulation library. Algorithms, data structures, not more. It doesn't need to do syscalls and stuff. There's not much benefit to writing it in C and as we just saw, a lot of downsides. It could have been written in many other languages.

pas 5y ago

Memory is cheap. (But not free of course!) Scala, Kotlin, and Java exist. The HotSpot VM is amazing, its JIT is mindblowing. (Probaly even TS + V8 would do the job for high level stuff.) It's complete nonsense that C is needed for accessing the HW. High level languages can do low-level bibanging just fine. So yes, there's a good reason, but that is inertia. Literally too big to fail, so it keeps on living. Even if we tomorrow outlawed C, drafted people to start rewriting things in a memory-managed language, and so on, it would take decades to get rid of it.