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C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attra

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concurrency primitives is just the wrong choice for any application that doesn't need the kind of low-level control C provides. Go ahead and jump on the bandwagon but don't come crying to me when you wind up with an unmaintainable mess riddled with security holes and fiendishly subtle memory errors.

Cacti 14y ago
"A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concurrency primitives is just the wrong choice for any application that doesn't need the kind of low-level control C provides." That's what libraries are for, numbnut.
jsaxton86 14y ago
You can wind up with "an unmaintanable mess riddled with security holes" in any language -- that's not unique to C. Regarding the flaws you have mentioned in C: Its flaws are very very well known, and this is a virtue. All languages and implementations have gotchas and hangups. C is just far more upfront about it. And there are a ton of static and runtime tools to help you deal with the most common and dangerous mistakes. That some of the most heavily used and reliable software in the world is built on C is proof that the flaws are overblown, and easy to detect and fix.
- munin 14y ago
  Security holes you wind up with in a Java or whatever codebase take the form of logic errors allowing for compromise of user information, or SQL injection or command injection. These are bad, they totally compromise data and systems. Security holes in C applications allow for the injection of low-level programs. This is way more annoying, IMO. also the static and runtime tools for C are good, and getting better, but still very far from being a replacement for writing code in a memory-safe language.
  - jerven 14y ago
    Agree and in C you still have all the bugs of the type that you describe for Java or whatever... It just there is a lot of C out there which means we will see it for ever in our systems somewhere. It will get better over time as tools improve the existing C code base.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  That's a misleading statement and I think you know it. In general, you have to go extremely out of your way to end up with a remote code execution exploit with Java or C#. Look at Microsoft's CVEs for 2012. Approximately all of the serious ones would be impossible with a proper type system. This is after all of Microsoft's static analysis tools and code reviews and security focus.
- betterunix 14y ago
  "You can wind up with "an unmaintanable mess riddled with security holes" in any language" Sure, but it is much, much, much easier to do in C than in other languages. By default you have unchecked array access, fixed width integers, strings terminated by a special character, and tons of exploitable undefined behavior. Writing secure code in C takes substantial effort, substantially more than in other languages.
theootz 14y ago
C is (more specifically) a 3rd generation language, and when I was going through high school I remember it always being on the list of high level languages. It's more recently now I think, that we consider it otherwise...
seiji 14y ago
In traditional circles (read: not rubymongojs land), C is considered a high level language because you aren't writing assembly or maintaining stacks by hand.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Not in this decade... I used to do embedded programming and even we considered C/C++ to be somewhere in the middle, with Java being the "high level" language for our management software and C/C++ being the "low level" language for our embedded devices.
  - mschaef 14y ago
    Did you run Java embedded?
    - rayiner 14y ago
      No, we ran Java in the middle-ware.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- betterunix 14y ago
  You are, however, dealing with pointers, memory deallocation, the bit widths of integers, etc. C as a high level language is a questionable idea.
afandian 14y ago
It's not particularly controversial to say that C is a high-level language. Maybe a bit historical, but it hasn't lost any features since it was new and ultra-high-level for its time.
timbre 14y ago
The author makes the point more effectively when he writes "It's blown everything else away to the point it's moved the bar and redefined what we think of as a low level language."
Thrymr 14y ago
> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstraction, of course. From the article: "It's not as high level as Java or C#, and certainly no where near as high level as Erlang, Python, or Javascript."
- ryeguy 14y ago
  The problem is that the "level" of a language is relative to other languages. If C is a high level language, that means you can group it into the same pool as Java, C#, Haskell, Python, and Ruby. Don't you see a bit of a difference here? Unless there is a significant number of actual languages, not concepts, that are below C, it logically has to be called a "low level language" because there really isn't much below it but there are TONS of languages above it. At the very least, it's something like a medium-level language. Grouping it with much higher-abstracted languages is just wrong.
  - afandian 14y ago
    You can do some very interesting things with function pointers, structs, unions and judicious use of void pointers. I would absolutely group it with Java. Not saying they are very very similar, but you can do similar things. Now grouping Java with Haskell, that doesn't seem like a reasonable grouping. Of course, it's all swings and roundabouts really. You can draw lines anywhere.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Yes indeed, you can do some very interesting things like interpret the raw bits of a float as a character and crash or corrupt your program.
      - afandian 14y ago
meaty 14y ago
That's why we have valgrind and glib. At the core, a good language shouldn't really have any of these things you say built in - they should be built on top of the language itself.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Having strings, containers, etc, not built into the language itself means that you can't practically use them. Libraries will all have their own incarnations, and as a result you get stuck dealing with the lowest common denominator of C arrays.
  - oinksoft 14y ago
    http://developer.gnome.org/glib/ http://developer.gnome.org/glib/ http://apr.apache.org/ http://apr.apache.org/ Choose one.
    - mpyne 14y ago
      That's kind of the point. Why do you have to choose? Why isn't it possible with the language and its standard libraries? What happens when you mix APR code with glib-using code?
      - matthiasv 14y ago
        1. Because there is no standard defining that. 2. Because there is no standard defining that. 3. Nothing. Functions in both libraries are prefixed to avoid name clashes.
        mpyne 14y ago
        The lack of standard for 1+2 is the complaint here. Prefixing in the libraries is a workaround to make it possible at all for their separate (but similar) basic types to co-exist, but the libraries shouldn't have to define sane basic types for these things. At most they should have to add extended operations. But because they don't, it must be reimplemented in each library that needs them, which adds to code size and semantic overhead. Which might be helpful is for a good basic type library to be created which could be a common dependency for each (perhaps host it on CCAN), but the fact that this would be needed at all is the base complaint.
mschaef 14y ago
> a barely functional string type There's a string type in C? All I see are character arrays and a few (poorly thought out) conventions for using them.
- dionidium 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Forget to place that NULL in the right place and boom!
- runarb 14y ago
  It may be cumbersome, but C has string handling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_string_handling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_string_handling
  - deelowe 14y ago
    This is an article about the standard library. C has no built in string handling. As an example, there are embedded systems that do no have support for string types due to a lack of support for libraries that handle it, yet they are 100% compliant with the C spec.
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      How you can be 100% compliant with the C spec by omitting strlen is a mystery to me.
    - caf 14y ago
      The C standard library is specified as part of the language specification document. The language defines two kinds of implementations: "hosted", which must support the entire standard library; and "freestanding", which do not. Those embedded systems that do not support the full standard library are 100% compliant freestanding implementations, but are not compliant hosted implementations.
michaelochurch 14y ago
C is a mid-level language and it dominates that space. The high-level space still doesn't have a winner and it probably won't for some time. It has a lot of excellent languages that are all radically different (Clojure, Haskell, Python, Scala, Erlang) and each is really cool in some ways and very infuriating in others. C, of course, is really cool in some ways and very infuriating in others as well. I've taken up learning C, and my feeling about it is that it's not a "jump in and figure it out" language, in the way that most technologies are, because you're absolutely right. Naive or "cargo cult" C is going to be a disaster from a security, code-quality, and production stability perspective. For most technologies to qualify as safe, sane, and consensual, they have to be secure even when wielded by a programmer who cobbled together incomplete knowledge from a few dozen Internet articles about how to do stuff. Not C. There are "quick adoption" technologies with quick learning curves and "lifer" technologies that are quirky and hard to learn at first but provide long-lived knowledge. C is a lifer language. If you don't treat it as such, you'll faceplant.
stcredzero 14y ago
> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. One problem with the term "high level language," is that it was coined many, many decades ago. C is a "high level language" like FORTRAN is one. Remember, when C was invented, programming via punch cards was still a routine activity in many shops. This is why the assertion that, "C is a fantastic high level language," or even that it's a high level language at all is so controversial: It exploits a term which is so old, changing expectations have tectonically shifted the programming field into a place where there is an opportunity for surprise and controversy. There are "high level languages" which are minimal, and those which are not. There are "high level languages" which offer a large amount of abstraction and those which offer less. Right there are two spectra which can be used to classify languages, and C is stuck near the extreme lower left corner. (A minimal language which offers less abstraction.) Then you have languages like Lisp and Smalltalk which are even more minimal, but which offer higher degrees of abstraction. When one says, "high level language," one is talking about a very broad category. Which is why you can do this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037315 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037315
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  It's not actually controversial, it's just arguing about the definition. Change the phrasing to "C is fantastic abstraction over the machine, but it's not in the same high level like, say, Erlang" and everyone agrees. The article uses an old standard as a little trick to try to put C in a category it doesn't belong.
corresation 14y ago
C is hardly a fad given that it is the foundation for the vast bulk of software that you interact with everyday (if not the top layer, ones below it). But of course at some point there is a looping back when silver bullets fail to pay off in the longer term.
venomsnake 14y ago
C is not a fad. The sudden love for C is the logical backlash caused by the abuse of lasagna layer upon layer of enterprise oo mvc enabled, xml configurable, orm supporting, osgi friendly huge monolith frameworks. A whole generation of developers have barely known simple and small. And they got tired of big enterprise and are searching for something "not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age." . Maybe it is the wrong direction in which they are searching - but I think that C mastery pays off in the long term.
- johncarpinelli 14y ago
  Totally agree. Learning object oriented frameworks gives me a headache. I learned C back in 1991 for first-year CS classes. Consider all the software built in C: Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, etc. It's the dominant infrastructure of the web. What language will be used to build the first human-level AI? I think it will probably be C, and less than 1 million lines of code.
  - Munksgaard 14y ago
    > What language will be used to build the first human-level AI? I think it will probably be C, and less than 1 million lines of code. I don't think so, but I respect your opinion.
asveikau 14y ago
As someone who's happy writing C, has written a lot of C at work and at home, I have to say "C fad" sounds a bit weird. What I see talking to people and looking at forums (this one for example) is the exact opposite of a C fad. Frankly I wish it were the other way. I encounter fewer and fewer people with C knowledge, and especially fewer people who say they are happy writing C. New college grads sure as hell don't graduate in large numbers knowing C, even if a good chunk of them can churn out acceptable Java.
hobbyist 14y ago
Isnt high level relative. I was once speaking to a friend who is an electrical engineer. While discussing some dsp stuff with him I explained some asm instructions, and suddenly he says you are going high level :) I am pretty sure if he speaks to some physics/semiconductor guy he probably will get the same answer back from them

Cacti 14y ago

"A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concurrency primitives is just the wrong choice for any application that doesn't need the kind of low-level control C provides." That's what libraries are for, numbnut.

jsaxton86 14y ago

You can wind up with "an unmaintanable mess riddled with security holes" in any language -- that's not unique to C. Regarding the flaws you have mentioned in C: Its flaws are very very well known, and this is a virtue. All languages and implementations have gotchas and hangups. C is just far more upfront about it. And there are a ton of static and runtime tools to help you deal with the most common and dangerous mistakes. That some of the most heavily used and reliable software in the world is built on C is proof that the flaws are overblown, and easy to detect and fix.

munin 14y ago
Security holes you wind up with in a Java or whatever codebase take the form of logic errors allowing for compromise of user information, or SQL injection or command injection. These are bad, they totally compromise data and systems. Security holes in C applications allow for the injection of low-level programs. This is way more annoying, IMO. also the static and runtime tools for C are good, and getting better, but still very far from being a replacement for writing code in a memory-safe language.
- jerven 14y ago
  Agree and in C you still have all the bugs of the type that you describe for Java or whatever... It just there is a lot of C out there which means we will see it for ever in our systems somewhere. It will get better over time as tools improve the existing C code base.
MichaelGG 14y ago
That's a misleading statement and I think you know it. In general, you have to go extremely out of your way to end up with a remote code execution exploit with Java or C#. Look at Microsoft's CVEs for 2012. Approximately all of the serious ones would be impossible with a proper type system. This is after all of Microsoft's static analysis tools and code reviews and security focus.
betterunix 14y ago
"You can wind up with "an unmaintanable mess riddled with security holes" in any language" Sure, but it is much, much, much easier to do in C than in other languages. By default you have unchecked array access, fixed width integers, strings terminated by a special character, and tons of exploitable undefined behavior. Writing secure code in C takes substantial effort, substantially more than in other languages.

theootz 14y ago

C is (more specifically) a 3rd generation language, and when I was going through high school I remember it always being on the list of high level languages. It's more recently now I think, that we consider it otherwise...

seiji 14y ago

In traditional circles (read: not rubymongojs land), C is considered a high level language because you aren't writing assembly or maintaining stacks by hand.

rayiner 14y ago
Not in this decade... I used to do embedded programming and even we considered C/C++ to be somewhere in the middle, with Java being the "high level" language for our management software and C/C++ being the "low level" language for our embedded devices.
- mschaef 14y ago
  Did you run Java embedded?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    No, we ran Java in the middle-ware.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
betterunix 14y ago
You are, however, dealing with pointers, memory deallocation, the bit widths of integers, etc. C as a high level language is a questionable idea.

afandian 14y ago

It's not particularly controversial to say that C is a high-level language. Maybe a bit historical, but it hasn't lost any features since it was new and ultra-high-level for its time.

timbre 14y ago

The author makes the point more effectively when he writes "It's blown everything else away to the point it's moved the bar and redefined what we think of as a low level language."

Thrymr 14y ago

> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstraction, of course. From the article: "It's not as high level as Java or C#, and certainly no where near as high level as Erlang, Python, or Javascript."

ryeguy 14y ago
The problem is that the "level" of a language is relative to other languages. If C is a high level language, that means you can group it into the same pool as Java, C#, Haskell, Python, and Ruby. Don't you see a bit of a difference here? Unless there is a significant number of actual languages, not concepts, that are below C, it logically has to be called a "low level language" because there really isn't much below it but there are TONS of languages above it. At the very least, it's something like a medium-level language. Grouping it with much higher-abstracted languages is just wrong.
- afandian 14y ago
  You can do some very interesting things with function pointers, structs, unions and judicious use of void pointers. I would absolutely group it with Java. Not saying they are very very similar, but you can do similar things. Now grouping Java with Haskell, that doesn't seem like a reasonable grouping. Of course, it's all swings and roundabouts really. You can draw lines anywhere.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Yes indeed, you can do some very interesting things like interpret the raw bits of a float as a character and crash or corrupt your program.
    - afandian 14y ago

meaty 14y ago

That's why we have valgrind and glib. At the core, a good language shouldn't really have any of these things you say built in - they should be built on top of the language itself.

rayiner 14y ago
Having strings, containers, etc, not built into the language itself means that you can't practically use them. Libraries will all have their own incarnations, and as a result you get stuck dealing with the lowest common denominator of C arrays.
- oinksoft 14y ago
  http://developer.gnome.org/glib/ http://developer.gnome.org/glib/ http://apr.apache.org/ http://apr.apache.org/ Choose one.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    That's kind of the point. Why do you have to choose? Why isn't it possible with the language and its standard libraries? What happens when you mix APR code with glib-using code?
    - matthiasv 14y ago
      1. Because there is no standard defining that. 2. Because there is no standard defining that. 3. Nothing. Functions in both libraries are prefixed to avoid name clashes.
      - mpyne 14y ago
        The lack of standard for 1+2 is the complaint here. Prefixing in the libraries is a workaround to make it possible at all for their separate (but similar) basic types to co-exist, but the libraries shouldn't have to define sane basic types for these things. At most they should have to add extended operations. But because they don't, it must be reimplemented in each library that needs them, which adds to code size and semantic overhead. Which might be helpful is for a good basic type library to be created which could be a common dependency for each (perhaps host it on CCAN), but the fact that this would be needed at all is the base complaint.

mschaef 14y ago

> a barely functional string type There's a string type in C? All I see are character arrays and a few (poorly thought out) conventions for using them.

dionidium 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Forget to place that NULL in the right place and boom!
runarb 14y ago
It may be cumbersome, but C has string handling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_string_handling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_string_handling
- deelowe 14y ago
  This is an article about the standard library. C has no built in string handling. As an example, there are embedded systems that do no have support for string types due to a lack of support for libraries that handle it, yet they are 100% compliant with the C spec.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    How you can be 100% compliant with the C spec by omitting strlen is a mystery to me.
  - caf 14y ago
    The C standard library is specified as part of the language specification document. The language defines two kinds of implementations: "hosted", which must support the entire standard library; and "freestanding", which do not. Those embedded systems that do not support the full standard library are 100% compliant freestanding implementations, but are not compliant hosted implementations.

michaelochurch 14y ago

C is a mid-level language and it dominates that space. The high-level space still doesn't have a winner and it probably won't for some time. It has a lot of excellent languages that are all radically different (Clojure, Haskell, Python, Scala, Erlang) and each is really cool in some ways and very infuriating in others. C, of course, is really cool in some ways and very infuriating in others as well. I've taken up learning C, and my feeling about it is that it's not a "jump in and figure it out" language, in the way that most technologies are, because you're absolutely right. Naive or "cargo cult" C is going to be a disaster from a security, code-quality, and production stability perspective. For most technologies to qualify as safe, sane, and consensual, they have to be secure even when wielded by a programmer who cobbled together incomplete knowledge from a few dozen Internet articles about how to do stuff. Not C. There are "quick adoption" technologies with quick learning curves and "lifer" technologies that are quirky and hard to learn at first but provide long-lived knowledge. C is a lifer language. If you don't treat it as such, you'll faceplant.

stcredzero 14y ago

> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. One problem with the term "high level language," is that it was coined many, many decades ago. C is a "high level language" like FORTRAN is one. Remember, when C was invented, programming via punch cards was still a routine activity in many shops. This is why the assertion that, "C is a fantastic high level language," or even that it's a high level language at all is so controversial: It exploits a term which is so old, changing expectations have tectonically shifted the programming field into a place where there is an opportunity for surprise and controversy. There are "high level languages" which are minimal, and those which are not. There are "high level languages" which offer a large amount of abstraction and those which offer less. Right there are two spectra which can be used to classify languages, and C is stuck near the extreme lower left corner. (A minimal language which offers less abstraction.) Then you have languages like Lisp and Smalltalk which are even more minimal, but which offer higher degrees of abstraction. When one says, "high level language," one is talking about a very broad category. Which is why you can do this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037315 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037315

MichaelGG 14y ago
It's not actually controversial, it's just arguing about the definition. Change the phrasing to "C is fantastic abstraction over the machine, but it's not in the same high level like, say, Erlang" and everyone agrees. The article uses an old standard as a little trick to try to put C in a category it doesn't belong.

corresation 14y ago

C is hardly a fad given that it is the foundation for the vast bulk of software that you interact with everyday (if not the top layer, ones below it). But of course at some point there is a looping back when silver bullets fail to pay off in the longer term.

venomsnake 14y ago

C is not a fad. The sudden love for C is the logical backlash caused by the abuse of lasagna layer upon layer of enterprise oo mvc enabled, xml configurable, orm supporting, osgi friendly huge monolith frameworks. A whole generation of developers have barely known simple and small. And they got tired of big enterprise and are searching for something "not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age." . Maybe it is the wrong direction in which they are searching - but I think that C mastery pays off in the long term.

johncarpinelli 14y ago
Totally agree. Learning object oriented frameworks gives me a headache. I learned C back in 1991 for first-year CS classes. Consider all the software built in C: Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, etc. It's the dominant infrastructure of the web. What language will be used to build the first human-level AI? I think it will probably be C, and less than 1 million lines of code.
- Munksgaard 14y ago
  > What language will be used to build the first human-level AI? I think it will probably be C, and less than 1 million lines of code. I don't think so, but I respect your opinion.

asveikau 14y ago

As someone who's happy writing C, has written a lot of C at work and at home, I have to say "C fad" sounds a bit weird. What I see talking to people and looking at forums (this one for example) is the exact opposite of a C fad. Frankly I wish it were the other way. I encounter fewer and fewer people with C knowledge, and especially fewer people who say they are happy writing C. New college grads sure as hell don't graduate in large numbers knowing C, even if a good chunk of them can churn out acceptable Java.

hobbyist 14y ago

Isnt high level relative. I was once speaking to a friend who is an electrical engineer. While discussing some dsp stuff with him I explained some asm instructions, and suddenly he says you are going high level :) I am pretty sure if he speaks to some physics/semiconductor guy he probably will get the same answer back from them