4 ms·

It's kind of unnerving there even is a community as part of a programming language. I learned C from the K&R book and an old Russian guy.

deathanatos 4y ago
I think it makes a lot of sense? A language has a surrounding set of commonly used and well adopted libraries for things that are common, but just not critical enough to get included within the standard library. E.g., having serde as a cornerstone for encoding/decoding means that, e.g., I can integrate with a decoder for complicated types easily, and I know how to do that independently of whether it's JSON, or TOML, or …. Having thiserror to help make rich error types. C, admittedly, doesn't really have that. But I think that's mostly to C's detriment; projects have to sort of fill in those blanks themselves. Largely, I don't think they do: C libraries heavily prefer to return ints for errors, and I don't know that there are really "common" libraries out there? Certainly not to the same degree. (I wonder if the efforts didn't get focused onto higher level languages.) Today, I'd mostly reach for C++ before C. Relatively¹ safer language, and the STL is far richer, and has basic data-structures that one requires for ordinary tasks. The situation is marginally better, e.g., there's boost, and the STL has seen some growth over time. The downside, I'd say, is a single implementation and a looser spec, whereas C is standardized and runs on far more platforms. ¹and I mean relatively, as it is pretty trivial to utterly annihilate one's leg with C++
aussiesnack 4y ago
That's funny. My first programming 'community' was entirely comprised of computer magazines and a gruff alcoholic ex-academic who would occasionally throw a manual at me and bark corrections.
pjmlp 4y ago
C community was originally on comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c.moderated, and there was this magazine thing called "The C User's Journal".
Georgelemental 4y ago
C is standardized by an ISO working group, and then there are multiple independent implementations. Rust is developed in the open, on GitHub by a single organization, which creates a single center for community to naturally aggregate around.

deathanatos 4y ago

I think it makes a lot of sense? A language has a surrounding set of commonly used and well adopted libraries for things that are common, but just not critical enough to get included within the standard library. E.g., having serde as a cornerstone for encoding/decoding means that, e.g., I can integrate with a decoder for complicated types easily, and I know how to do that independently of whether it's JSON, or TOML, or …. Having thiserror to help make rich error types. C, admittedly, doesn't really have that. But I think that's mostly to C's detriment; projects have to sort of fill in those blanks themselves. Largely, I don't think they do: C libraries heavily prefer to return ints for errors, and I don't know that there are really "common" libraries out there? Certainly not to the same degree. (I wonder if the efforts didn't get focused onto higher level languages.) Today, I'd mostly reach for C++ before C. Relatively¹ safer language, and the STL is far richer, and has basic data-structures that one requires for ordinary tasks. The situation is marginally better, e.g., there's boost, and the STL has seen some growth over time. The downside, I'd say, is a single implementation and a looser spec, whereas C is standardized and runs on far more platforms. ¹and I mean relatively, as it is pretty trivial to utterly annihilate one's leg with C++

aussiesnack 4y ago

That's funny. My first programming 'community' was entirely comprised of computer magazines and a gruff alcoholic ex-academic who would occasionally throw a manual at me and bark corrections.

pjmlp 4y ago

C community was originally on comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c.moderated, and there was this magazine thing called "The C User's Journal".

Georgelemental 4y ago

C is standardized by an ISO working group, and then there are multiple independent implementations. Rust is developed in the open, on GitHub by a single organization, which creates a single center for community to naturally aggregate around.