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Question: is C gaining in popularity? If so, why exactly? Are their good reasons to be using C in product development rather than more modern languages?

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 2y ago
I don’t know anything about trends but I still write some C because it’s widely supported across a variety of platforms.
eknkc 2y ago
I’ve started using zig for some stuff recently and it can include c effortlessly. Also with rust it is pretty easy to interact with c (well, you need unsafe and I guess for this particular case, bindgen would not be able to provide bindings). I would not reach to c libraries on many other platforms but recently I started using more c, just not from c..
bluetomcat 2y ago
It looks like some cool new kids are rediscovering it, after more than a decade of pythonisation and javascriptisation of programming. You can have things that behave like values and actually reside on the stack, you can ask the operating system for more memory and you have static fixed-size memory which is allocated when the program is run. Good old procedures without the distractions of prototypal inheritance, variable hoisting, dynamic typing, coroutines, list comprehensions and lambda callbacks. It's probably a more relevant tool for a larger class of problems than many people imagine.
- jerf 2y ago
  There are a large number of "C but better" options, where the direction of "better" varies. Examples would be Go, Zig, Rust, each a different "direction" of better, but generally better. Anyone thinking of trying this I would advise against going to C directly. The footguns are dangerous enough as it is and are arguably even more dangerous if you're coming from a more modern language that if you came at C directly. You don't need to go this far back in time to have these things. But I do strongly agree that anyone who has done nothing by dynamic scripting language development should pick up a modern static language and learn how to use it. I consider having at least one of each a basic tool in the well-rounded developer's toolkit. And if you're still running on 200x-era arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of static versus dynamic languages, as many people are, you're going to be pleasantly surprised by the modern static languages. But you won't be pleasantly surprised by C. Most of the arguments developed for static vs. dynamic in that era were really about dynamic versus C. They all still apply; C qua C has not moved much since then. (Maybe you could justify C as "closer to the metal" but in the modern era personally I'd recommend just going straight to assembly for orientation and a tour. You don't have to dive super deep into it to get the sense.)
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I agree. There’s not a plausible scenario where I’d start a new project in C today. I’d pick one of the alternatives you mentioned if I needed that level of control and compilation to native code. The risk/reward ratio for C over any of those isn’t worth it in any case where I’d need something like it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ajross 2y ago
I think it's less that it's gaining in popularity than that we're seeing some backlash from the people who aren't liking Rust as much as they wanted to. The boring truth is still that if you have a "bottom layer" task to solve that needs access to hardware details (be it instruction formats, SIMD algorithms, MMIO drivers, system-dependent stuff like container management, etc...) C remains the quickest and easiest and frankly the most fun environment to do it in. I mean, there's a reason why Karpathy is hacking on "llm.c" as part of his "clean up the world" project and not "llm.rs". Is that a good thing or bad thing? I won't engage. But I think that's where the psychology is. For myself, I genuinely love C in a way that it's clear I never will Rust.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > I mean, there's a reason why Karpathy is hacking on "llm.c" as part of his "clean up the world" project and not "llm.rs". You post this as if everyone is supposed to know who Karpathy is or what any of that means...
  - throwaway17_17 2y ago
    Andrej Karpathy was the head of AI at Tesla and was the primary developer of the AI/Machine Learning curriculum at Stanford. He is an unabashed user of C for the development of ML.
  - carbonatom 2y ago
    > You post this as if everyone is supposed to know who Karpathy is or what any of that means... Firstly, this is HN! If every commenter mentioning Karpathy has to prefix their comment with an intro about Karpathy and LLM, then HN will become a boring read. Secondly, if you don't know who Karpathy is and what any of this means, it is not all that difficult to search for "Karpathy" and "LLM" in your favorite search engine.
hedora 2y ago
From what I've seen of people progressing through their careers, being a strong C++ programmer helps a lot with learning Rust, and being a strong C programmer helps a lot with C++. I'd be curious to see how new developers do with Rust out of the gate moving forward. It basically makes you generate a machine checkable proof that you're using advanced memory management techniques correctly, and those techniques were invented to make zero cost abstractions work in C++. Anyway, for me, it's Rust for all new projects these days, but I still like the minimalism of C. Big companies say it takes about 6 months for strong engineers unfamiliar with all this stuff to reach productivity with Rust. I'd guess those same engineers could get to the point of writing sort-of-correct C in a week or so.
wolfspaw 2y ago
C evolves, even if slowly. I think some devs are fed up of Complexity and excessive abstractions. C has very few language features, it's a very simple language -- while all modern languages have new (complex and taxing) features. It's kinda like a Minimalist movement, can we do the same Modern Mumbo Jumbo but in a simple, minimalistic C way? GC and RAII? Nah, just use Arenas/Pools. Or don't use heap at all. C is an unsafe language but modern tools get better and better every year, with GCC doing really cool static analysis and finding buffer overflows at compile time. Also, C runs anywhere and everywhere.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Anyone who thinks C is simple is just aiming the gun at their foot. If you want simple, you want something like Scheme.
  - Joker_vD 2y ago
    See e.g. wonderfully named "A Simple, Possibly Correct LR Parser for C11" [0], specifically the opening discussion of the ambiguities in the C grammar. Never mind the semantics, which are quite divorced from the underlying hardware! I mean, PDP-11 had a carry flag, a double-wide multiplication instruction, a combined divide-with-remainder instruction (just as x86 does) yet those are unexposed in C. [0] https://hal.science/hal-01633123/document https://hal.science/hal-01633123/document
  - short_sells_poo 2y ago
    I think parent means simple as in the language has very few facilities and the ones it gives you are very barebones (hence simple). C is simple in the sense that a screwdriver is simple compared to a power tool. It doesn't mean that it is simple to use correctly. An expert might be able to accurately judge the torque achieved by hand, but a beginner can easily under- or over-torque things. Etc...
  - b3orn 2y ago
    Yes, but maybe I want to shoot myself in the foot or am willing to take the risk, it's my computer and nobody can tell me what to do with it. That's why I like C. I've been writing Python for almost two decades now, all the new languages are trying even more to tell me how to do things or that I'm doing them wrong, screw that, I don't want to be coddled or patronised by the language I'm using, I'm writing C.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
TFA isn't about product development. Things that you hope will be used in widely different contexts need to be created using tools that can easily be "glued" into those widely different contexts. Right now, C remains the best glue language we have. If you want to write things that can be used from dozens of other languages (or even just 2 other languages), you are likely to write it in C. In 5-10 years time? We'll see (no pun intended)
vineyardlabs 2y ago
Perhaps this is obvious, but embedded systems. C/C++ are still really the only languages where you can basically take for granted that you'll have functional tooling and something resembling a standard library regardless of what processor you're targeting. And many embedded projects still reach for C over C++ because a lot of the functionality the C++ adds isn't really ideal for embedded environments anyway, so for team ergonomics it ends up being better to reach for the simpler language that's easier to teach to new devs, etc.
truckerbill 2y ago
It’s the FFI thing - it’s next to impossible to bind to Cpp or rust in a preferred language. It’s a great tragedy that so much code is cloistered away. In 10 years Zig , maybe Mojo or Odin or something else will have stolen mind share away
ironman1478 2y ago
C is the lingua franca for embedded and I think embedded is becoming bigger, both in community and in literal size. There are lots of new devices that are bigger than a small arduino (and even bigger than my pc from a decade ago) and require a lot of software written for them. This requires huge teams working on them, but the only languages available is C or in some cases some limited form of C++. Because there are new people coming to these spaces, they are taking ideas from outside of the firmware world and applying them to the pseudo-firmware world because they want to use them. Thats my observation at least. I also think C is just so frictionless, that even if it is dangerous people will use it anyway. Yes there are a thousand footguns like people have said, but in the end you can get something compiling and running pretty easily, which is enough I guess.
hgs3 2y ago
> Question: is C gaining in popularity? Did C ever go away? The computing industry is built on C. It is the foundation underpinning everything. > Are their good reasons to be using C in product development rather than more modern languages? Even if you use a "modern" programming language you'll be building on C at some level. Linux, Postgres, Redis, CPython, etc. are all written in C. Most programming languages have a C FFI for a reason. It is worthwhile to familiarize yourself with C if only to have an understanding of what underpins everything. Besides, you never know, you might need to write a native Python module or Postgres plugin one day.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 2y ago

I don’t know anything about trends but I still write some C because it’s widely supported across a variety of platforms.

eknkc 2y ago

I’ve started using zig for some stuff recently and it can include c effortlessly. Also with rust it is pretty easy to interact with c (well, you need unsafe and I guess for this particular case, bindgen would not be able to provide bindings). I would not reach to c libraries on many other platforms but recently I started using more c, just not from c..

bluetomcat 2y ago

It looks like some cool new kids are rediscovering it, after more than a decade of pythonisation and javascriptisation of programming. You can have things that behave like values and actually reside on the stack, you can ask the operating system for more memory and you have static fixed-size memory which is allocated when the program is run. Good old procedures without the distractions of prototypal inheritance, variable hoisting, dynamic typing, coroutines, list comprehensions and lambda callbacks. It's probably a more relevant tool for a larger class of problems than many people imagine.

jerf 2y ago
There are a large number of "C but better" options, where the direction of "better" varies. Examples would be Go, Zig, Rust, each a different "direction" of better, but generally better. Anyone thinking of trying this I would advise against going to C directly. The footguns are dangerous enough as it is and are arguably even more dangerous if you're coming from a more modern language that if you came at C directly. You don't need to go this far back in time to have these things. But I do strongly agree that anyone who has done nothing by dynamic scripting language development should pick up a modern static language and learn how to use it. I consider having at least one of each a basic tool in the well-rounded developer's toolkit. And if you're still running on 200x-era arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of static versus dynamic languages, as many people are, you're going to be pleasantly surprised by the modern static languages. But you won't be pleasantly surprised by C. Most of the arguments developed for static vs. dynamic in that era were really about dynamic versus C. They all still apply; C qua C has not moved much since then. (Maybe you could justify C as "closer to the metal" but in the modern era personally I'd recommend just going straight to assembly for orientation and a tour. You don't have to dive super deep into it to get the sense.)
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I agree. There’s not a plausible scenario where I’d start a new project in C today. I’d pick one of the alternatives you mentioned if I needed that level of control and compilation to native code. The risk/reward ratio for C over any of those isn’t worth it in any case where I’d need something like it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ajross 2y ago

I think it's less that it's gaining in popularity than that we're seeing some backlash from the people who aren't liking Rust as much as they wanted to. The boring truth is still that if you have a "bottom layer" task to solve that needs access to hardware details (be it instruction formats, SIMD algorithms, MMIO drivers, system-dependent stuff like container management, etc...) C remains the quickest and easiest and frankly the most fun environment to do it in. I mean, there's a reason why Karpathy is hacking on "llm.c" as part of his "clean up the world" project and not "llm.rs". Is that a good thing or bad thing? I won't engage. But I think that's where the psychology is. For myself, I genuinely love C in a way that it's clear I never will Rust.

MisterTea 2y ago
> I mean, there's a reason why Karpathy is hacking on "llm.c" as part of his "clean up the world" project and not "llm.rs". You post this as if everyone is supposed to know who Karpathy is or what any of that means...
- throwaway17_17 2y ago
  Andrej Karpathy was the head of AI at Tesla and was the primary developer of the AI/Machine Learning curriculum at Stanford. He is an unabashed user of C for the development of ML.
- carbonatom 2y ago
  > You post this as if everyone is supposed to know who Karpathy is or what any of that means... Firstly, this is HN! If every commenter mentioning Karpathy has to prefix their comment with an intro about Karpathy and LLM, then HN will become a boring read. Secondly, if you don't know who Karpathy is and what any of this means, it is not all that difficult to search for "Karpathy" and "LLM" in your favorite search engine.

hedora 2y ago

From what I've seen of people progressing through their careers, being a strong C++ programmer helps a lot with learning Rust, and being a strong C programmer helps a lot with C++. I'd be curious to see how new developers do with Rust out of the gate moving forward. It basically makes you generate a machine checkable proof that you're using advanced memory management techniques correctly, and those techniques were invented to make zero cost abstractions work in C++. Anyway, for me, it's Rust for all new projects these days, but I still like the minimalism of C. Big companies say it takes about 6 months for strong engineers unfamiliar with all this stuff to reach productivity with Rust. I'd guess those same engineers could get to the point of writing sort-of-correct C in a week or so.

wolfspaw 2y ago

C evolves, even if slowly. I think some devs are fed up of Complexity and excessive abstractions. C has very few language features, it's a very simple language -- while all modern languages have new (complex and taxing) features. It's kinda like a Minimalist movement, can we do the same Modern Mumbo Jumbo but in a simple, minimalistic C way? GC and RAII? Nah, just use Arenas/Pools. Or don't use heap at all. C is an unsafe language but modern tools get better and better every year, with GCC doing really cool static analysis and finding buffer overflows at compile time. Also, C runs anywhere and everywhere.

KerrAvon 2y ago
Anyone who thinks C is simple is just aiming the gun at their foot. If you want simple, you want something like Scheme.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  See e.g. wonderfully named "A Simple, Possibly Correct LR Parser for C11" [0], specifically the opening discussion of the ambiguities in the C grammar. Never mind the semantics, which are quite divorced from the underlying hardware! I mean, PDP-11 had a carry flag, a double-wide multiplication instruction, a combined divide-with-remainder instruction (just as x86 does) yet those are unexposed in C. [0] https://hal.science/hal-01633123/document https://hal.science/hal-01633123/document
- short_sells_poo 2y ago
  I think parent means simple as in the language has very few facilities and the ones it gives you are very barebones (hence simple). C is simple in the sense that a screwdriver is simple compared to a power tool. It doesn't mean that it is simple to use correctly. An expert might be able to accurately judge the torque achieved by hand, but a beginner can easily under- or over-torque things. Etc...
- b3orn 2y ago
  Yes, but maybe I want to shoot myself in the foot or am willing to take the risk, it's my computer and nobody can tell me what to do with it. That's why I like C. I've been writing Python for almost two decades now, all the new languages are trying even more to tell me how to do things or that I'm doing them wrong, screw that, I don't want to be coddled or patronised by the language I'm using, I'm writing C.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

TFA isn't about product development. Things that you hope will be used in widely different contexts need to be created using tools that can easily be "glued" into those widely different contexts. Right now, C remains the best glue language we have. If you want to write things that can be used from dozens of other languages (or even just 2 other languages), you are likely to write it in C. In 5-10 years time? We'll see (no pun intended)

vineyardlabs 2y ago

Perhaps this is obvious, but embedded systems. C/C++ are still really the only languages where you can basically take for granted that you'll have functional tooling and something resembling a standard library regardless of what processor you're targeting. And many embedded projects still reach for C over C++ because a lot of the functionality the C++ adds isn't really ideal for embedded environments anyway, so for team ergonomics it ends up being better to reach for the simpler language that's easier to teach to new devs, etc.

truckerbill 2y ago

It’s the FFI thing - it’s next to impossible to bind to Cpp or rust in a preferred language. It’s a great tragedy that so much code is cloistered away. In 10 years Zig , maybe Mojo or Odin or something else will have stolen mind share away

ironman1478 2y ago

C is the lingua franca for embedded and I think embedded is becoming bigger, both in community and in literal size. There are lots of new devices that are bigger than a small arduino (and even bigger than my pc from a decade ago) and require a lot of software written for them. This requires huge teams working on them, but the only languages available is C or in some cases some limited form of C++. Because there are new people coming to these spaces, they are taking ideas from outside of the firmware world and applying them to the pseudo-firmware world because they want to use them. Thats my observation at least. I also think C is just so frictionless, that even if it is dangerous people will use it anyway. Yes there are a thousand footguns like people have said, but in the end you can get something compiling and running pretty easily, which is enough I guess.

hgs3 2y ago

> Question: is C gaining in popularity? Did C ever go away? The computing industry is built on C. It is the foundation underpinning everything. > Are their good reasons to be using C in product development rather than more modern languages? Even if you use a "modern" programming language you'll be building on C at some level. Linux, Postgres, Redis, CPython, etc. are all written in C. Most programming languages have a C FFI for a reason. It is worthwhile to familiarize yourself with C if only to have an understanding of what underpins everything. Besides, you never know, you might need to write a native Python module or Postgres plugin one day.