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I'm old enough to be in both camps. After years of toodling around in a variety of BASIC languages, I took a class on C. For the first time, I went from a vag

by klyrs 4y ago

I'm old enough to be in both camps. After years of toodling around in a variety of BASIC languages, I took a class on C. For the first time, I went from a vague text-to-result association to a clear picture of machine and its inner workings*. I then learned C++ and Java which were both hot garbage at the time, and a variety of scripting languages. The scripting langues are great for high productivity and mediocre performance. Shell languages are great for interacting with the operating system. Query languages are great for interacting with big data. But for years, C was the unparalleled language for getting the best performance out of CPU-intensive algorithms. I've still never found a language that erases these boundaries -- while I'm a "C programmer" I'm multilingual by necessity. Today? C's performance is matched by C++, and more tedious to write. Zig is there on performance, but for my purposes, the language gets in the way. Rust also gets in the way, and can end up forcing reference-counting which tanks performance. I do like how Go mostly gets out of the way, but again, I cannot abide unnecessary reference counting. * and, yes, the abstraction is a lie, but it's an incredibly useful and high-performance abstraction

throwawaymaths 4y ago
> Zig is there on performance, but for my purposes, the language gets in the way I guess zig for me is indeed a slightly more complicated language than c, and it's way more verbose, but what I appreciate about it is that straightforward code looks good and code that is on shakier ground looks hairier which is basically a "this code is sus, plz review the fuck out of it" sign. In the end though, what gets in the way for me with C is everything else to ship a "real c program", especially when you want/need someone else's code. Lexical macros, header/code separation, flat namespace, errno, architecture dependent definitions for int, char, etc, having to think about object (file) units, make, automake, config... At that point the cognitive burden is enough that a small added complexity in the language is worth it
int_19h 4y ago
Go uses a tracing garbage collector. Although I suppose that's even worse from this perspective. If you don't mind me asking, how does Zig get in the way? My own gut feel is that it's the only real "better C" out of the present crop of alternatives.

by klyrs 4y ago

throwawaymaths 4y ago

> Zig is there on performance, but for my purposes, the language gets in the way I guess zig for me is indeed a slightly more complicated language than c, and it's way more verbose, but what I appreciate about it is that straightforward code looks good and code that is on shakier ground looks hairier which is basically a "this code is sus, plz review the fuck out of it" sign. In the end though, what gets in the way for me with C is everything else to ship a "real c program", especially when you want/need someone else's code. Lexical macros, header/code separation, flat namespace, errno, architecture dependent definitions for int, char, etc, having to think about object (file) units, make, automake, config... At that point the cognitive burden is enough that a small added complexity in the language is worth it

int_19h 4y ago

Go uses a tracing garbage collector. Although I suppose that's even worse from this perspective. If you don't mind me asking, how does Zig get in the way? My own gut feel is that it's the only real "better C" out of the present crop of alternatives.