3 ms·

They wrote the whole thing in C?! Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex projects... I was trying to write C the other day and holy shi

by brabel 4y ago

They wrote the whole thing in C?! Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex projects... I was trying to write C the other day and holy shit, it's incredibly hard to write anything that involves more than a couple of files... it just has almost no abstractions and one small slip and you've got a segfault that terminates your program without trace :D I gave up very quickly and been learning Zig now... as low level, but extremely saner to write stuff. Anyway, why would I usee Fossil rather than Git exactly? Are there code hosts that support it? It does look interesting, but I don't see the motivation to do it when so many hosts support git (people who think GitHub is the "only" host need to look around: there's literally dozens of options), and I'm quite ok using it specially with intelliJ and magit (emacs) support.

teruakohatu 4y ago
> Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex project If you use any open source operating systems a significant portion of software you interact with are C (kernel, shell, utilities, sqlite etc).
- brabel 4y ago
  I'm well aware... but still, when I see new software written in C when there are so many languages available (which was not the case when Linus started writing Linux) it's amazing to me, both because they can actually do it (I definitely don't have the discipline to pull it off, spoiled too much by high level languages) and because they didn't just choose to use something easier like Go or even Java.
  - dzaima 4y ago
    C isn't that hard; you certainly have to approach things in a pretty different way, and it does have a slower curve to productivity, but once you get past the hurdle of having less abstraction (i.e. mostly by just not making pointless abstractions, and having general utilities for the cases you do need some) and learn "gdb -ex r ./program <enter> [wait for crash] bt <enter>" to get a stacktrace, it's, give or take, usable.

by brabel 4y ago

teruakohatu 4y ago

> Wow, I really admire people who can turn C into useful, complex project If you use any open source operating systems a significant portion of software you interact with are C (kernel, shell, utilities, sqlite etc).

brabel 4y ago
I'm well aware... but still, when I see new software written in C when there are so many languages available (which was not the case when Linus started writing Linux) it's amazing to me, both because they can actually do it (I definitely don't have the discipline to pull it off, spoiled too much by high level languages) and because they didn't just choose to use something easier like Go or even Java.
- dzaima 4y ago
  C isn't that hard; you certainly have to approach things in a pretty different way, and it does have a slower curve to productivity, but once you get past the hurdle of having less abstraction (i.e. mostly by just not making pointless abstractions, and having general utilities for the cases you do need some) and learn "gdb -ex r ./program <enter> [wait for crash] bt <enter>" to get a stacktrace, it's, give or take, usable.