Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkrumins | Hacker News Reader

No one cares about the standards. We only care about getting things done by writing regular C code that works.

Huh? What do you think defines “regular C code that works”? Standards.

Every compiler you have used operates at a bare minimum on the C standard. That’s why they are often advertised (if not GCC/Clang which are assumed to be up to date) as “C(89|99|11|17) compliant.” “Code that works” is code which is operates under constraints and guarantees specified by a standard, anything else is undefined or unportable.

Embedded environments are specific and esoteric enough that compiler portability is the least of your concern when migrating code from one platform to the other.

Only the standards people care about standards. We (programmers) want to just get things done. We don't care about the standards. No one reads the standards. Also no one cares about portability. All computers have been the same for the last 20 years.

We, developers, care about standards, because we want to get things done once.

Right, then comes the day another OS or CPU needs to be supported and some clever developers learn their lesson about language standards during a couple of late nights tracking down production issues.

Seems way more efficient to not care about standards and invest a couple late nights once every five years.

Exactly. You are the real MVP in this thread. We should team up.

I'll rather have code that runs on an actual computer than code that should hypothetically run according to a long document that costs 60 dollars to read.

Exactly. You get it 100%. We should work together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com