3 ms·

>You don't want a garbage collector to kick in unexpectedly, you don't want data structures to be allocated in mysterious ways. All of that (and everything els

>You don't want a garbage collector to kick in unexpectedly, you don't want data structures to be allocated in mysterious ways. All of that (and everything else C is attributed with) can be accomplished without using an arcane preprocessor/include system and you can have niceties such as a saner type system, generics/macros, namespaces, etc. C is a language stuck with the design decisions that reflected the programming environments in the 60's and 70's but make absolutely no sense in modern context and now we are just stuck with it because of inertia.

chipsy 15y ago
I would agree and would elaborate that the major weaknesses of C are a combination of build system issues and an overly weak type system. It wasn't realistic to have the whole compile process done in memory in the early 70's, and OS virtual memory wasn't realistic either; but we've long surpassed those concerns, and that means that all the thinking about the program namespace, modules, linking, pre-processing, etc. is worth re-evaluating. As well, we can do better static checking now, without including any notion of GC; in an imperative execution model, leakage of memory, handles, processes etc. remains orthogonal to type safety. C has heavily bottlenecked program control logic from the beginning - a callstack, looping constructs, etc. - and allowing some equivalents to exist in its data structures would make user code tremendously more reliable. These changes, often paired with some more attention to concurrency, show up in all the newer system language designs - D, Go, Rust, Clay, BitC, etc.
CJefferson 15y ago
Anyone who tries building a better C (for example Go) seems to end up going "too far", and as well as fixing the things you mention, ends up adding garbage collection, and various other things which are not suitable for very low level systems programming. I teach C, and I would love a "cleaner C" mode, which just got rid of lots of the bizareeness of C, several of which you mention. The fact that many compilers will warn with '-Wall' about code which is clearly incorrect, but due to the rules of C they cannot simply reject, is irritating.
- queensnake 15y ago
  (add -Werror - your students will never know.)
- pjmlp 15y ago
  Fact is there are many examples of operating systems implemented with GC enabled systems languages. Spin, Oberon, Singularity, Home are just a few of them. The main problem is that for a systems programing language to be used a such, there much exist a successful operating system that uses it as its main language. In Windows 8, the main systems language is C++/CX (C++ with reference counting extensions), so the time will come.
- cygx 15y ago
  The fact that many compilers will warn with '-Wall' about code which is clearly incorrect, but due to the rules of C they cannot simply reject, is irritating. The rules of C are actually stricter than many reople realize (add -std=c99 -pedantic-errors to gcc and you can get an idea about that -- this, however, still won't catch semantic errors like aliasing violations). Personally, I'm using clang with -Weverything and remove warnings as necessary. On gcc, there are a lot of useful warnings which are not included in -Wall. My current warning levels look like this: -std=c99 -pedantic -Werror -Wall -Wextra \ -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wshadow -Wpointer-arith \ -Wcast-align -Wwrite-strings -Wredundant-decls -Wcast-qual \ -Wnested-externs -Winline -Wno-long-long -Wconversion -Wstrict-prototypes

chipsy 15y ago

I would agree and would elaborate that the major weaknesses of C are a combination of build system issues and an overly weak type system. It wasn't realistic to have the whole compile process done in memory in the early 70's, and OS virtual memory wasn't realistic either; but we've long surpassed those concerns, and that means that all the thinking about the program namespace, modules, linking, pre-processing, etc. is worth re-evaluating. As well, we can do better static checking now, without including any notion of GC; in an imperative execution model, leakage of memory, handles, processes etc. remains orthogonal to type safety. C has heavily bottlenecked program control logic from the beginning - a callstack, looping constructs, etc. - and allowing some equivalents to exist in its data structures would make user code tremendously more reliable. These changes, often paired with some more attention to concurrency, show up in all the newer system language designs - D, Go, Rust, Clay, BitC, etc.

CJefferson 15y ago

Anyone who tries building a better C (for example Go) seems to end up going "too far", and as well as fixing the things you mention, ends up adding garbage collection, and various other things which are not suitable for very low level systems programming. I teach C, and I would love a "cleaner C" mode, which just got rid of lots of the bizareeness of C, several of which you mention. The fact that many compilers will warn with '-Wall' about code which is clearly incorrect, but due to the rules of C they cannot simply reject, is irritating.

queensnake 15y ago
(add -Werror - your students will never know.)
pjmlp 15y ago
Fact is there are many examples of operating systems implemented with GC enabled systems languages. Spin, Oberon, Singularity, Home are just a few of them. The main problem is that for a systems programing language to be used a such, there much exist a successful operating system that uses it as its main language. In Windows 8, the main systems language is C++/CX (C++ with reference counting extensions), so the time will come.
cygx 15y ago
The fact that many compilers will warn with '-Wall' about code which is clearly incorrect, but due to the rules of C they cannot simply reject, is irritating. The rules of C are actually stricter than many reople realize (add -std=c99 -pedantic-errors to gcc and you can get an idea about that -- this, however, still won't catch semantic errors like aliasing violations). Personally, I'm using clang with -Weverything and remove warnings as necessary. On gcc, there are a lot of useful warnings which are not included in -Wall. My current warning levels look like this: -std=c99 -pedantic -Werror -Wall -Wextra \ -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wshadow -Wpointer-arith \ -Wcast-align -Wwrite-strings -Wredundant-decls -Wcast-qual \ -Wnested-externs -Winline -Wno-long-long -Wconversion -Wstrict-prototypes