4 ms·

You once claimed C requires UNIX like OS to run.

• coldtea 5y ago
  And he was right. He didn't mean it as a statement of fact (which would be wrong, and he already knew it).
  • nec4b 5y ago
    No he was definitely wrong. Ask any C developer. His comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20828974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20828974
    • pornel 5y ago
      When I complain C's portability sucks, because it can't do anything useful without a ton of ifdefs, people tell me it's not a problem, I should just use POSIX. https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1224413742667988992 https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1224413742667988992
• pjmlp 5y ago
  I claim it yet again on this very comment. Without UNIX spreading with its free beer into universities, C would have been a footnote on the history of system programming languages.
  • nec4b 5y ago
    Nope in the above comment you claim something else. Here is where you claim C requires UNIX like OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20828974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20828974 Let me tell you, in embedded development we run C on bare metal or under RTOS. There is no UNIX in sight. And the code is portable to many CPU architectures.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      A snowflake RTOS without POSIX, call me amazed.
      • nec4b 5y ago
        I'm happy you learned something.
        • pjmlp 5y ago
          Not really, still waiting for the name of such marvelous OS.
          • nec4b 5y ago
            Keil RTOS. You can also use C on bare metal without an OS. I hope you won't claim next that CPU's are UNIX like OSs.
  • tialaramex 5y ago
    Much more importantly, without UNIX and free beer TCP/IP there's a fair chance the Internet isn't the Network and none of this (gestures at HN and the Web) happens. That's a much bigger impact than C which is just a programming language, even if you count the influence of NUL-terminated strings, and all the semi-colon languages (including even Javascript and Rust, which are very different from C but preserve the enthusiasm for semi-colons) the Internet as Network makes more difference. In particular it's possible X.25 could have won. JANET (the tertiary education network in the United Kingdom) was exclusively doing X.25 until 1991, when it tries an experiment offering IP. Unsurprisingly free beer TCP/IP offers a cornucopia of interesting new toys and sites are very enthusiastic about JIPS (the experimental IP service) so that by 1992 the IP service is no longer an experiment but the primary service, with X.25 maintained only until 1997. You do get the Network anyway of course, that's what everything is leading up to after Shannon, but you probably get an X.25 flavoured Network instead of the Internet, or some other system coming from another direction, and broad deployment might have been delayed into the early 21st century rather than the 1990s depending on exactly how things work out. Stallman's GNU project doesn't happen, Tim's toy hypermedia system either doesn't exist or is a small inconsequential experiment largely unknown outside hypermedia fanatics, and Linus Torvalds probably doesn't make an operating system kernel for his 386 microcomputer. It's a very different environment, C is small potatoes by comparison.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      So? I could deal with such alternative universe, after all, between 1986 and 1994, I managed to work with computers and networking just fine.