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It also has a few downsides: - The build system is broken. vs. make. qmake. cmake. autotools. scons. 'modern' makefiles (>_> what does that even mean? Yes, I'

It also has a few downsides: - The build system is broken. vs. make. qmake. cmake. autotools. scons. 'modern' makefiles (>_> what does that even mean? Yes, I'm looking at you Google) There's a whole ecosystem of tools out there to solve this. - There are a few rubbish IDEs, most of which support c as a second class candidate. VS has officially abandoned C; xcode grudgingly supports it. The CDT is mediocre. There's little or no support for refactoring or doing other things on large code bases, and the majority of the time the work has to be done manually. - Because the build system is broken, dependency management is hell Got one library that uses scons, another using autoconf, and what to build a local dev instance of a library without installing it into the system path? Goooood luck. This is made even worse by arcane things like rpath, which mean that dynamic libraries only work when they are in specific paths relative to the application binary (I'm looking at you OSX). - Its a terrible collaboration platform. Why? Because the barrier to entry is high. To submit a patch that works and doesn't break other things, doesn't introduce serious security holes or memory leaks is hard. Astonishingly, some successful projects like SDL are actually written in C, but most C projects are not collaboration friendly. - There are no frameworks for doing common high productivity tasks in C, only low level system operations, or vastly complicated frameworks with terrible apis (>_> GTK). I'll just whip up a C REST service that talks to mysql and point nginx at it. Um... yeah. I'm sure there's an easy way to do that. ...perhaps...? How about a quick UI application? We'll just use GTK, that's portable and easy. ...Or, not very easy, and vastly complicated to setup and build. These issues aren't unique to C, but they're certainly issues. I'm not really sure I'd happily wonder around telling people how amazing C is at everything. It's a tool for some jobs; definitely not all.

makmanalp 14y ago
For the record, I found cmake to be the best. The output is great, the convenience is awesome, the only thing that bugs me is the strange syntax, which is fine because once you set it up it gets out of your way fine.
- JulianK 14y ago
  Though it doesn't reach all the dark corners that cmake does, I found premake to be much easier to figure out and customize. All the configuration is done in Lua and you can customize the state with a normal programming language as opposed to the crazy cmake arcana you sometimes have to resort to.
  - tehwalrus 14y ago
    To both parents: whenever I have to install and work out how to debug yet another C build system on my Mac (default build settings never work on Macs), it leaves me wanting to (and indeed going on to) rewrite entire libraries I should be just using. (notable exception: autohell seems to work, some of the time, and it even sometimes fails with an error telling me what's wrong.) When I use python extensions (often written in C), this problem doesn't arise because distutils, and sometimes cython, handle everything. Python isn't the best C build system, but frankly it scores better than cmake and friends for ease of use.
    - makmanalp 14y ago
      Oh, yeah, definitely, I wish everything was as easy as "pip install". On the other hand, I can sympathize with nothing working on macs. This is because the environment plain sucks. All the installed tools and libraries are old as hell and rarely get updated, and it's riddled with quirks and tools that are subtly different on osx. I hear it's gotten better with Mountain Lion. Thank god for homebrew.
      - tehwalrus 14y ago
        Macports is my tool of choice, but yes it's the only way to get things done! Unfortunately, plenty of scientific libraries are too obscure to be ported, leaving it to us scientists... Interesting what you say about 10.8 - I might give it a shot then. I will be upgrading soon from snow leopard (2009 MBP) and I was going to wipe and go debian/XFCE, because of all the "new ideas" like "let's not have save as" etc, but if installing stuff is easier (and I know multitouch works) I might give it a go.
kyrra 14y ago
> It's a tool for some jobs; definitely not all. I'd completely agree. I would not use C for doing any web platform work (writing a REST service as you say). I may write a webserver in C if I had tight memory constraints. Where I see C still being very useful: embedded applications, drivers, and latency sensitive code. When you are trying to push the most I/O possible through a network interface or disk interface, C allows extremely tight controls on memory and CPU usage. Especially if you are coding to a specific CPU for an embedded product, you can really tweak the app to perform as required (though, this may require some assembly to do what you need).
- dakimov 14y ago
  I have done low-level and mobile programming on very restricted platforms and I cannot see any reason why in the world I would use C instead of C++. Basically there is always an opportunity to use C++ if you can use C. Myths that C++ is slower are spread by people who just do not know C++ well or are not skilled/clever enough to use it.
  - jasonzemos 14y ago
    Bravo. I had to read 15 minutes worth of comments to finally find one person who actually knows the truth. And this little gem was downvoted. Bravo.
  - yuushi 14y ago
    Indeed. And there are numerous reasons why C++ code can be/is significantly faster; firstly code inlining for code that would be required to use function pointers in C (ala qsort vs std::sort), secondly, things such as expression templates for things such as Matrix libraries.
dakimov 14y ago
By the way, I refactor C with regexps and text utils. In UNIX a pretty complicated refactoring can be done with a shell oneliner. This method actually rules. C allows that because it does not have namespaces. C is minimalistic so that it allows working with it with minimalistic tools rather comfortably.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Really?! Have you ever looked at what InteliJ allows as refactoring tools?
  - dakimov 14y ago
    IntelliJ Idea for Java?
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      Yes. There are lots of refactorings that cannot be done by simple search and replace, even for C, because they require semantic knowledge of the language.
      - matthavener 14y ago
        Very true, especially when you considering how many namespaces C has. In C++, its even harder.
      - dakimov 14y ago
        There is a problem that each and every tool for semantic-aware C/C++ refactoring I have tried does not work 100% of the time (i.e. it sucks more than 0%). This happens particularly because C/C++ have header files that expand to huge source files and preprocessor macros driving the parsers nuts because the parsers of the refactoring tools are simplified for speed, and also in a typical C/C++ program there is a number of combinations of macros that can be active or non-active depending on compiler options. So in case of C it always comes out faster, easier and more reliable for me to use basic tools such as search/replace because C has very simple semantics without namespaces. I often do that even in C++ because of the mentioned reasons.
popee 14y ago
> There are no frameworks for doing common high productivity tasks in C, only low level system operations, or > vastly complicated frameworks with terrible apis (>_> GTK). > I'll just whip up a C REST service that talks to mysql and point nginx at it. Um... yeah. I'm sure there's > an easy way to do that. ...perhaps...? Search for libfcgi. It's nice and simple C library that can be used behind nginx and as the matter of fact anything that supports fcgi. In this case routes are defined on nginx. But just think a bit, it's nice little framework ;-) Btw used exactly that few months ago.

makmanalp 14y ago

For the record, I found cmake to be the best. The output is great, the convenience is awesome, the only thing that bugs me is the strange syntax, which is fine because once you set it up it gets out of your way fine.

JulianK 14y ago
Though it doesn't reach all the dark corners that cmake does, I found premake to be much easier to figure out and customize. All the configuration is done in Lua and you can customize the state with a normal programming language as opposed to the crazy cmake arcana you sometimes have to resort to.
- tehwalrus 14y ago
  To both parents: whenever I have to install and work out how to debug yet another C build system on my Mac (default build settings never work on Macs), it leaves me wanting to (and indeed going on to) rewrite entire libraries I should be just using. (notable exception: autohell seems to work, some of the time, and it even sometimes fails with an error telling me what's wrong.) When I use python extensions (often written in C), this problem doesn't arise because distutils, and sometimes cython, handle everything. Python isn't the best C build system, but frankly it scores better than cmake and friends for ease of use.
  - makmanalp 14y ago
    Oh, yeah, definitely, I wish everything was as easy as "pip install". On the other hand, I can sympathize with nothing working on macs. This is because the environment plain sucks. All the installed tools and libraries are old as hell and rarely get updated, and it's riddled with quirks and tools that are subtly different on osx. I hear it's gotten better with Mountain Lion. Thank god for homebrew.
    - tehwalrus 14y ago
      Macports is my tool of choice, but yes it's the only way to get things done! Unfortunately, plenty of scientific libraries are too obscure to be ported, leaving it to us scientists... Interesting what you say about 10.8 - I might give it a shot then. I will be upgrading soon from snow leopard (2009 MBP) and I was going to wipe and go debian/XFCE, because of all the "new ideas" like "let's not have save as" etc, but if installing stuff is easier (and I know multitouch works) I might give it a go.

kyrra 14y ago

> It's a tool for some jobs; definitely not all. I'd completely agree. I would not use C for doing any web platform work (writing a REST service as you say). I may write a webserver in C if I had tight memory constraints. Where I see C still being very useful: embedded applications, drivers, and latency sensitive code. When you are trying to push the most I/O possible through a network interface or disk interface, C allows extremely tight controls on memory and CPU usage. Especially if you are coding to a specific CPU for an embedded product, you can really tweak the app to perform as required (though, this may require some assembly to do what you need).

dakimov 14y ago
I have done low-level and mobile programming on very restricted platforms and I cannot see any reason why in the world I would use C instead of C++. Basically there is always an opportunity to use C++ if you can use C. Myths that C++ is slower are spread by people who just do not know C++ well or are not skilled/clever enough to use it.
- jasonzemos 14y ago
  Bravo. I had to read 15 minutes worth of comments to finally find one person who actually knows the truth. And this little gem was downvoted. Bravo.
- yuushi 14y ago
  Indeed. And there are numerous reasons why C++ code can be/is significantly faster; firstly code inlining for code that would be required to use function pointers in C (ala qsort vs std::sort), secondly, things such as expression templates for things such as Matrix libraries.

dakimov 14y ago

By the way, I refactor C with regexps and text utils. In UNIX a pretty complicated refactoring can be done with a shell oneliner. This method actually rules. C allows that because it does not have namespaces. C is minimalistic so that it allows working with it with minimalistic tools rather comfortably.

pjmlp 14y ago
Really?! Have you ever looked at what InteliJ allows as refactoring tools?
- dakimov 14y ago
  IntelliJ Idea for Java?
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Yes. There are lots of refactorings that cannot be done by simple search and replace, even for C, because they require semantic knowledge of the language.
    - matthavener 14y ago
      Very true, especially when you considering how many namespaces C has. In C++, its even harder.
    - dakimov 14y ago
      There is a problem that each and every tool for semantic-aware C/C++ refactoring I have tried does not work 100% of the time (i.e. it sucks more than 0%). This happens particularly because C/C++ have header files that expand to huge source files and preprocessor macros driving the parsers nuts because the parsers of the refactoring tools are simplified for speed, and also in a typical C/C++ program there is a number of combinations of macros that can be active or non-active depending on compiler options. So in case of C it always comes out faster, easier and more reliable for me to use basic tools such as search/replace because C has very simple semantics without namespaces. I often do that even in C++ because of the mentioned reasons.

popee 14y ago

> There are no frameworks for doing common high productivity tasks in C, only low level system operations, or > vastly complicated frameworks with terrible apis (>_> GTK). > I'll just whip up a C REST service that talks to mysql and point nginx at it. Um... yeah. I'm sure there's > an easy way to do that. ...perhaps...? Search for libfcgi. It's nice and simple C library that can be used behind nginx and as the matter of fact anything that supports fcgi. In this case routes are defined on nginx. But just think a bit, it's nice little framework ;-) Btw used exactly that few months ago.