The case against a C alternative
c3.handmade.network
c3.handmade.network
I don't think this is true, in the general case: Rust has shown that languages can be safe in ways that improve runtime performance.
In particular, languages like Rust allow programmers to express stronger compile-time constraints on runtime behavior, meaning that the compiler can safely omit bounds and other checks that an ordinary C program would require for safety. Similarly, Rust's (lack of) mutable aliasing opens up entire classes of optimizations that are extremely difficult on C programs (to the extent that Rust regularly exposes bugs in LLVM's alias analysis, due to a lack of exercise on C/C++ inputs).
Edit: Other examples include ergonomic static dispatch (Rust makes things like `foo: impl Trait` look dynamic, but they're really static under the hood) and the entire notion of a "zero-cost abstraction" (Rust's abstractions are no worse than their "as if" equivalent, meaning that the programmer is restricted in their ability to create suboptimal implementations).
(And thanks to the other person as well, who presumably deleted the same comment after seeing yours.)
"Emit" means "to send out", eg "emit a strange noise", "emit radiation".
- trying to access an arbitrary element in a slice, the compiler will emit bounds checks (`if index > len: panic()`) to avoid an uncontrolled out-of-bounds memory access — https://godbolt.org/z/cbY5ebzvK (note how if you comment out the assert, the code barely changes, because the compiler is adding an invisible assert of its own)
- if the compiler can infer that `index` will always be less than `len`, then it will omit the bounds check — https://godbolt.org/z/TTashYnjd
For example, typical C programs also don't use hashtables even when this makes the most sense, causing weird performance cliffs due to O(n^2) algorithms all over the place. Why not hashtables? Because they're not generic, so they're a pain to use. Not impossible of course, it's just that C developers avoid them.
Similarly, "strongly typed" containers full of simple struct types enable compiler auto-vectorisation that's often unavailable in C for the same kind of reason.
Last but not least, you would have to be a masochist to write heavily multi-threaded code in C... so hardly anybody does. These days, that's throwing away over 90% of the computer power in a typical PC, let alone a server.
I think you are mixing hyperthreading, or SMT with regular "software" threading
Parallelism aka CPU-bound tasks are limited by the number of cores you have. Concurrency aka IO-bound tasks are not, because they're usually not all runnable at once. It can be faster to go concurrent even on a single core because you can overlap IOs, but it'll use more memory and other resources.
Also, "going faster" isn't always a good thing. If you're a low priority system task, you don't want to consume all the system resources because the user's apps might need them. Or the the user doesn't want the fans to turn on, or it's a passive cooled system that shouldn't get too hot, etc.
And for both of them, it not only makes it easier to write bugs in unsafe languages, but in safe languages you can easily accidentally make things slower instead of faster just because it's complicated.
Using his distinction, concurrency isn't about IO-boundedness (though that's a common use-case for it), but instead is about composing multiple processes (generic sense). They may or may not be running in parallel (truly running at the same time).
On a unix shell this would be an example of concurrency, which may or may not be parallel:
$ cat a-file | sort | uniq | wc
This hasn't fully caught on, though.
> Concurrency is concerned about correctness, parallelism concerned about performance.
Concurrency is concerned about keeping things correct[1] when multiple things are happening at once and sharing resources. The reason why those problems arise might be for performance reasons, e.g. multiplexing IO over different threads. As such, performance is still a concern. But, your solution space still involves the thread and IO resources, and how they interleave.
Parallelism is in a different solution space: you are looking at the work space (e.g. iteration space) of the problem domain and designing your algorithm to be logically sub-dividable to get the maximum parallel speedup (T_1 / T_inf). Now, a runtime or scheduler will have to do the dirty work of mapping the logical subdivisions to hardware execution units, and that scheduler program is of course full of concurrency concerns.
[1] For the sake of pedantry: yes, parallelism is sometimes also used to deal with correctness concerns: e.g. do the calculation on three systems and see if the results agree.
That’s PCs that have steam installed at all.
Intel’s bare minimum current-gen i3 processor has 12 threads. That’s the absolute cheapest desktop-level processor you can get.
Your phone probably has 6 cores (though not 12 threads).
So yes, if you’re writing code for desktop hardware, it’s safe to assume you have at least 8 threads. Maybe you don’t want to consume all of them, but it’s better to let the OS handle scheduling.
Steam doesn't even measure publicize information about threads on the survey, which makes it near impossible to check because not that long ago Intel locked out hyperthreading/SMT on their low/mid-grade CPUs.
Additionally, and more importantly: the Steam hardware survey _obviously_ doesn't represent the average consumer PC.
Low end systems (4 threads or less) have less potential, but they also have the most need for speed, making multi-threading quite important. And high-end systems have more threads, so going multi-thread makes a bigger difference.
If I look around me, for instance in my whole family we're two with Steam installed but ever household has a desktop or a laptop (and generally a 7-8 years old cheap entry-level 350€ one, you'd be hard-pressed to find even a quad-core in there)
Just that single core systems are dying and probably won’t come back. Even Raspberry Pi’s are quad core now.
I want to write software that people, most people, not only those with SV salaries able to buy a computer every year, can use.
Here's the current best seller laptop in Amazon in my country: https://www.amazon.fr/Dell-Inspiron-i5-1135G7-Ordinateur-por...
It's half past 2022 and the most sold laptop here in France, 7th-ranked in GDP, has 8 gigabytes of RAM and 4 cores. This is what the real world looks like. (and just a year ago it was still 4GB of RAM iirc)
The second best sale is a gamer PC which is a bit better. https://www.amazon.fr/MILUI-Modulaire-Colosseum-Livraison-30...
The third https://www.amazon.fr/Ordinateur-Portable-Celeron-Resolution... comes with a CPU that does not support hyperthreading (so 4C/4T) and does not even support friggin AVX and goes to SSE4.2 at most.
That does not mean not making use of multiple cores of course, but a software should still be able to work on a single-core. Right now we only have certifications such as https://www.blauer-engel.de/en/productworld/resources-and-en... (see https://www.umwelt-campus.de/en/research/projekte/green-soft... for the methodology) but hopefully in a few years we can start making it first heavily discouraged and over time less and less viable to create resource-wasting software - in any case this is a thing I am asking of the people whom I vote for :-)
Edit to add:
Related to your links to best-selling computers, I've been thinking about downgrading to a low-spec PC as my daily driver, and using a remote machine for the times that I truly need something powerful for a big compile or the like. That would force me to feel the users' pain. But how far should I go? Taken to the extreme, I could use a machine with a spinning rust hard drive (not SSD) and the bare minimum system requirements for Windows 10 or 11, and keep all the crapware on it to more accurately reflect the typical user's environment. But then, maybe I'd just be hurting myself for no benefit, since the pressure to value developer productivity over runtime efficiency would not actually go away in the absence of regulations.
my rule of thumb for the software I develop is - on my desktop computer (2016 intel 6900k, still plenty powerful) - there mustn't be any slowness / lag in any user interaction when built at -O0 with -fsanitize=address. This has ensured so far that said software had correct performance on optimized builds on a Raspberry Pi 3 in ARMv7 mode.
People are apparently surprised at how easy it is to ignore the GDPR:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200813235643/http://slawsonand...
> Article 3(2), a new feature of the GDPR, creates extraterritorial jurisdiction over companies that have nothing but an internet presence in the EU and offer goods or services to EU residents[1]. While the GDPR requires these companies[2] to follow its data processing rules, it leaves the question of enforcement unanswered. Regulations that cannot be enforced do little to protect the personal data of EU citizens.
> This article discusses how U.S. law affects the enforcement of Article 3(2). In reality, enforcing the GDPR on U.S. companies may be almost impossible. First, the U.S. prohibits enforcing of foreign-country fines. Thus, the EU enforcement power of fines for noncompliance is negligible. Second, enforcing the GDPR through the designated representative can be easily circumvented. Finally, a private lawsuit brought by in the EU may be impossible to enforce under U.S. law.
[snip]
> Currently, there is a hole in the GDPR wall that protects European Union personal data. Even with extraterritorial jurisdiction over U.S. companies with only an internet presence in the EU, the GDPR gives little in the way of tools to enforce it. Fines from supervisory authorities would be stopped by the prohibition on enforcing foreign fines. The company can evade enforcement through a representative simply by not designating one. Finally, private actions may be stalled on issues of personal jurisdiction. If a U.S. company completely disregards the GDPR while targeting customers in the EU, it can use the personal data of EU citizens without much fear of the consequences. While the extraterritorial jurisdiction created by Article 3(2) may have seemed like a good way to solve the problem of foreign companies who do not have a physical presence in the EU, it turns out to be practically useless.
"Patching" that hole seems to require either action on the American side or, perhaps, a return to old-fashioned impressment or similar projection of Majestic European Power to Benighted Lands Beyond the Ocean Sea. /s
Still big multinational companies will have international branches (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, ...) that can easily be fined in their host countries.
For example, a company like Digital Ocean might have no assets of any kind in the EU (assuming that they don't own their European datacenters), so the EU cannot force them to pay a fine nor seize their assets; the EU could technically sanction them by stopping EU datacenter providers (like AWS-Germany) from renting compute to Digital Ocean, but maybe not for something like a GDPR violation.
But, in many modern languages (including c++) multi threading 1. Doesn’t significantly detract from the performance of single core systems 2. Can massively improve the performance of multi core systems, even with 2 cores or more.
For appropriate applications, the memory overhead and the cost of the bootstrapping code for instantiating a worker thread should be dwarfed by the time of actually computing the task (we’re talking about actions 100ms or longer). Not using multiple threads when you could reasonably half or quarter that time (without needing to drop support for single-core systems) is just foolish. If you’re that worried about single core performance then maintain two code paths, but at least recognize that the majority of commodity systems sold today, including the ones you listed, have multiple threads available to them to do the work that have the most painful wait times.
Writing multithreaded applications increases the performance ceiling. If an application can’t take use of multiple threads, but is written in a multi-threaded way, there’s no harm done. It simply runs the multi threaded code in a single threaded way (think of ParArray) with a bit of overhead incurred for “becoming multithreaded”.
Reasoning out of adding multithreaded support for long running actions because “most systems can’t take use of the extra threads” is just irrational, especially since most modern commodity systems could have a linear improvement with the additional threads.
The single core systems are barely hurt by the memory overhead involved with provisioning CORE_NUM of worker threads. But the multi core systems can take massive advantages from it.
I wish more developers would work on RPIs for the same reason.
My $400 laptop from 2014 has a quad core processor.
I'm about to buy a PC with 16 cores and 32 threads for "normal" money.
The AMD EPYC server CPUs scale to dual sockets with 64-cores each, for a whopping 256 hardware threads in a single box. That's not some sort of esoteric hyper-scale configuration, but completely ordinary off-the-shelf stuff you can get in large quantities from mainstream vendors.
A single-threaded application on a server like that will use between 0.5% to about 50% of the total available performance, depending on where its bottleneck is. It will never reach 100%!
This matters to things like CLI tools, batch jobs, and the like, many of which are written in C, especially in the Linux world. A case-in-point that demonstrates how much performance has been left on the table is ripgrep, which is a multi-threaded Rust replacement for grep.
struct Example<const N: usize> {
pub e: [i32; N],
}[0] https://capnproto.org/news/2015-03-02-security-advisory-and-...
You obviously ideally want both, but that's not actually possible when you have a language this powerful. So, Rest's choice means sometimes (more rarely these days but it can happen) you will write a program that is correct, but the compiler doesn't believe you and rejects your program, you will need to alter it, perhaps after alterations it's actually nicer, but equally perhaps you feel this made it uglier or slower, nevertheless you have no choice in Rust (well, you could try waiting a few years, the compiler gets smarter)
However the C++ choice means sometimes (maybe even often) you will write a program that isn't correct and the compiler gives you no indication whatsoever that there's a problem, you get an executable or object file or whatever out, but what it does is completely arbitrary. Maybe it works how you expected... until it doesn't.
The magic phrase in the C++ standard is "Ill-formed, no diagnostic required". For example suppose you try to sort some floats in C++ 20. That's ill-formed (floats aren't in fact Totally Ordered but the function signature says you promise they are) and no diagnostic is required for... whatever it is your program now does. Maybe it crashes, maybe it works fine, not their problem, good luck with that.
Now, probably if all your floats are like boring normal finite reals like -2.5 or something this will work fine, there's no practical reason it wouldn't, but who knows, the C++ language denies all responsibility. So it gets to be very "optimal" here since it can do whatever it wants and it's your fault.
Instead, to sort a slice of floats, you have to explicitly specify what would happen for the non-ordinary cases; e.g. by using `.sort_by(f32::total_cmp)`, where f32::total_cmp()[2] is one possible interpretation of a total ordering of floats. This requires writing more code even for cases where it would be completely unnecessary.
[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.slice.html#method.so... [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.f32.html#method.tota...
How is this a negative? I'd rather program fail at compile than runtime, and rather it fail loudly than quietly.
Also Rust doesn't prevent you from making optimal ordering, just a tinge more verbose.
I agree! I was just illustrating the kind of tradeoff that has to be made for that to be possible.
let geese = something(lots_of_birds).bunch().of_chained().functions();
let geese = geese.somehow().just().count_them(); // We don't actually need geese, just #
However, if you do run into trouble those Clippy rules can save you. You probably will find you don't want them all (or perhaps any of them) at deny, but Rust is content for you to decide you only want a warning (which you can then suppress where appropriate) and importantly these are three rules, you might well decide you only hate shadow_same or shadow_reuse or something. Here's the link specifically for shadow_reuse as an example:
https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/master/#shadow_reuse
Has C++ ever failed to snarf a feature?
But part of the impetus for Carbon is that WG21 (the C++ Standards Committee) rejected proposals that C++ should focus on better performance and safety. So maybe performance is no longer important either. What's left?
Where they've taken things which might appear on the surface to be modelled on a safer Rust feature, usually the committee insists they be made unsafe. For example suppose I call a Rust function which might return a char or might not, it returns Option<char> and if I'm an idiot and I try to treat that as a char, it doesn't type check because it isn't one, I need to say what I'm going to do when it isn't or else that won't compile.
You can write that in modern C++... except it can automatically try to take the char (which isn't there) out of the empty optional structure and that's Undefined Behaviour. So whereas the Rust prevents programmers from making easy mistakes, the C++ turns those into unexploded bombs throughout your code.
One obvious corner case: It is very common to allocate a buffer at startup and let the system clean it up when the program exits. (often this is embedded cases where the only way for the program to exit is power off). I don't know how you do this in rust (if you can - I'm not a rust expert)
This is possible with the lazy_static library or (not yet in stable Rust) OnceCell. It allows you to allocate & initialize any datastructure once during runtime and get global read-only access.
And many that are negated due to a bad std API.
And C++ has the potential to be faster than C, mostly thanks to metaprogramming (templates, ...). It is horrible if you have to do it, but if you are just using the standard library, you don't have to feel the pain but still take advantage of it. That's how algorithms are implemented. Because so much is known at compile time, optimizers can do a lot.
The reason C++ is generally regarded as slower is that C++ programmers tend to create objects on the heap all the time because constructors and destructors make it easy. Modern C++ also discourages raw pointers and so you get references counters all over the place, essentially turning C++ into a garbage collected language. I am not saying it is bad, but it certainly impacts performance.
But if you manage your memory in C++ just as you do in C, keeping track of all your buffers reusing them, and not using more than necessary, I can easily see C++ beat C.
Since 1993, I never saw any need to keep bothering with C other than having it imposed on me, C++ had enough C89 subset on it, if I ever miss coding like C and its warts.
Nowadays that compatibility is up to C11 subset.
Not true unfortunately, the "C subset" is still stuck at something that can at best be called a fork of "C95" which was then developed into a "bastard language" that resembled C on the surface, but isn't actually C (e.g. the incomplete designated init support in C++20 is the best example of this half-assed "looks like C, but isn't actually C" philosophy).
This doesn't match my experience. It's true that modern C++ discourages owning raw pointers, but the solution is usually unique_ptr, not shared_ptr. Truly shared ownership is actually pretty uncommon IME, usually you can have one entity which obviously "owns" the object and then any other reference to it can be non-owning.
It's also worth noting that with std::move, actually changing the refcount of a share_ptr can be pretty rare even if you do have shared ownership.
Do you mean in terms of cache locality because it's heap-allocated instead of stack-allocated, or are you actually commenting on the overhead of copying some extra ints and invoking the destructor?
Because it's certainly correct that just because you can use a unique_ptr, doesn't mean you should. ("A std::unique_ptr is used for expressing transfer of ownership. If you never pass ownership elsewhere, the std::unique_ptr abstraction is rarely necessary or appropriate." - https://abseil.io/tips/187)
As an added bonus, you don't actually have to do a separate heap allocation.
It's like the classic argument against using exceptions: compared with the traditional C method of completely ignoring error conditions and not checking status, they're much slower.
As a C programmer, I try to avoid tracking ownership in separate struct member fields. I try to make central data structures that keep care of the tracking. Cleaning up shouldn't happen pointer-by-pointer. Usually a much bigger context has a shared lifetime, so there is no point in splitting stuff up in individually tracked "objects". Instead you just track a bigger block of memory.
One wart of unique_ptr (and other smart pointers) is that it cannot be passed in a register when used as a function parameter, at least with the System V ABI used on Linux.
Also, the caller is responsible for destruction and there is no way to specify that a function always "consumes" a unique_ptr so the compiler cannot eliminate the destructor code: https://godbolt.org/z/sz79GoETv
Of course if the compiler can inline the call or at least controls both and can clone the function with a custom calling convention then that doesn't have to be a problem. But it still sucks that even something as seemingly simple as a tiny wrapper around a pointer does come with a cost.
Sometimes you C++ guys are just blinded by the tale of "zero-cost abstractions".
unique_ptr, like the idea of RAII in general, binds together what should be separate. Data schemas and physical layout on the one hand, and memory and lifetime management on the other hand. What you get as a result is what you deserve: The idea of "more safe and maintainable" where the "more" isn't added to the equivalent non-RAII program. No, it is added to the more convoluted, less understandable, and thus inherently less safe and maintainable program. Who knows what the bottom line is (in my experience often safety is a bit better but I pray for you if you need to debug a problem, and maintainability is much worse), but out of interest in my own sanity I know my preference.
How are they separate? Like, that’s what Rust does pretty explicitly, with great results.
Tbh, Back then, I didn't see a problem with it. Once i started chasing down weird bugs where objects aren't freed properly because no one knew which objects own what, I have been very cautious.
Anything you can do in C++, you can do in C. But C++ compilers will generally optimize semantically equivalent code better than C compilers will, because C++ gives the compiler more freedom.
I.e. your data structure is like this:
generic_hashtable Hash; // (hash->int)
Foo *values; // where my typed data is.And yes, C developers also tend to avoid ordered containers.
IME that's mostly a myth though. A C compiler will stamp out a specialized version just as well if it can see all the relevant function bodies (either via inlining or LTO).
"Zero cost abstraction" isn't just a C++ thing, it happens mostly in the language agnostic optimizer passes. For instance the reason why std::sort() shows up faster in benchmarks than C's qsort() is simply because std::sort() implementation is all inline template code, not because of some magic performance-enhancing qualities of the C++ template system.
AFAIK out of the major compilers, gcc has the most aggressive cloning, but it's still nowhere near to const propagate the comparator from qsort. With std::sort with a stateless comparator function object (such as std::less, which is the default), you get this for free*.
* of course this is not entirely free, as this is more prone to code bloat. But, you can always type-erase the comparator, and use a function pointer, or std::function, if this ever becomes a problem. But you can't convince a C compiler to const propagate the comparator in qsort all the way through, if the optimizer chooses that it doesn't worth it.
On a sidenote, it has weird claims:
> obviating the need for ownership type systems or other compiler approaches to fixing the type-safety of use-after-frees. This means that we need one heap per type, and be 100% strict about it.
---
C lets you do most of what C++ can if you rely on always_inline. This didn't used to be the case, but modern C compilers will meat-grind the code with repeated application of the following things:
- Inlining any always_inline call except if it's recursive or the function uses some very weird features that libpas doesn't use (like goto pointer).
- Copy-propagating the values from the callsite into the function that uses the value.
Consequently, passing a function pointer (or struct of function pointers), where the pointer points to an always_inline function and the callee is always_inline results in specialization akin to template monomorphization.
This works to any depth; the compiler won't be satisfied until there are no more always_inline function calls. This fortuitous development in compilers allowed me to write very nice template code in C. Libpas achieves templates in C using config structs that contain function pointers -- sometimes to always_inline functions (when we want specialization and inlining) and sometimes to out-of-line functions (when we want specialization but not inlining). Additionally, the C template style allows us to have true polymorphic functions. Lots of libpas slow paths are huge and not at all hot. We don't want that code specialized for every config. Luckily, this works just fine in C templates -- those polymorphic functions just pass around a pointer to the config they are using, and dynamically load and call things in that config, almost exactly the same way that the specialized code would do. This saves a lot of code size versus C++ templates.
It's also an apples-to-oranges comparison, since std::sort and qsort implement different algorithms.
A lot of std::sort's performance is actually from using the version without any callbacks. If you pass a comparator function which just compares two integers the obvious way, it gets much slower. So one of std::sort's biggest advantages is actually not that it uses templates, but that it's specialized for the common case of not needing a custom callback. Theoretically the compiler should make the two cases the same, but apparently GCC is too dumb (that's not a slight on GCC; I think people expect too much from compilers):
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
------------------------------------------------------------------------
std_sort_random 52881299 ns 52873089 ns 14
std_sort_with_callback_random 63319633 ns 63307876 ns 11
qsort_random 106803314 ns 106784567 ns 7
external_sort_random 97642851 ns 97640888 ns 7
std_sort_sorted 8433311 ns 8432564 ns 82
std_sort_with_callback_sorted 13868016 ns 13865170 ns 50
qsort_sorted 28098439 ns 28093720 ns 26
external_sort_sorted 33629020 ns 33628108 ns 21
When I drill further down into everything I want to drill into, maybe I'll publish the source for the benchmarks somewhere.
This is not true. `std::sort`'s default comparator is a `std::less` object. The advantage comes from using a stateless callback functor object. If you pass a capture-less lambda instead of a function pointer, you can reap the same benefits as using the default comparator. Even if that capture-less lambda just forwards to a specific free function anyway.
In short, `std::sort(beg, end, [](auto x, auto y) { return foo(x,y); })` can be faster than `std::sort(beg, end, &foo)`.
PS.: I'm just annoyed that my generic C hashtable that is written in a qsort style doesn't get function copied/inlined when it's used for more than one type.
I'm not sure it's fair to say C developers avoid hash tables - I've worked on several projects with hash-table implementations in them.
The 'problem' if there is one, is that such things are rarely picked up from any sort of standard library, and are instead implemented in each project.
I'm also not really sure what the problem is with 'resorting' to void*, it's part of the language. It's not 'safe' in that the compiler won't catch your errors if you stuff any old thing in there, but that's C.
> you would have to be a masochist to write heavily multi-threaded code in C
pthreads makes it relatively straightforward. I've seen (and written) fairly sophisticated thread-pool implementations around them.
Yeah C doesn't really go in for that sort of thing. The standard library tends to be much more about some minimal support for strings and interfaces to OS features like files, signals, memory allocation etc. It doesn't really provide much in the way of building blocks to be reused by application developers.
The recommendation out there on the net seems to be to look at Glib, which is used by gtk, for that sort of thing.
Another good alternative might be the NSPR - https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/nspr/reference/index...
I used this way back in 2001-3 for a multi-platform project because it provides some good platform abstractions, and it looks like it has a hash-table implementation in amongst its other features.
Development in C is slow, fraught with unexpected pitfalls and you end up writing an awful lot of stuff from scratch. While this is satisfying in some ways, I find the modern paradigms of the languages I work in now to be more fulfilling - yes you throw a lot of existing components together, but you also get to deliver functionality much more frequently.
There are also a lot of very old-school C shops out there, that don't believe in modern things like CI/CD, git, even automated testing. I'm sure there are good ones too, but there are a lot of dinosaurs in that arena. One of the last ones I contracted for (for about three weeks until I quit) responded to my usual first-day question of "OK, how do we build this product?" with "Oh don't worry about that, we can sort that out later" and later never came.
That all said - I really enjoyed working on a couple of embedded devices. Seeing what you can achieve with 128kB of SRAM and 256kB of flash is challenging, and since I was a kid I've enjoyed making the computer do stuff. With embedded devices that have buzzers, leds, little displays etc, you get immediate feedback. And having to think more about things like memory allocation strategies does influence your thinking in (I think) a good way. You can definitely gain some deep knowledge!
This was equally true back when C vs Fortran was the big debate, and something not easily captured in benchmarks. C, as written by an expert in high performance C, was equally fast as Fortran written by an expert in high performance Fortran. C, as written by a domain expert with limited programming skills, was often very much slower than Fortran written by a domain expert with limited programming skills.
The gist, as I recall it was: the initial, idiomatic, written-for-maintainability version of the C# program was significantly faster than the C++ equivalent. Up until the end, the C# version also generally needed to go through less heroics to keep up with the C++ version. Eventually, the final C++ version did end up being faster than the fastest C# one, but, considering what needed to be done to get there, it was a decidedly Pyrrhic victory.
One huge mitigating factor, though, is that the model program was doing something business-y. I doubt C++ would have had such a hard time of it if it had been a number crunching or systems program.
That observation was actually key to the C++ version ultimately producing the fastest version. Chen replaced malloc() with an implementation that was tailored to the problem in question.
I guess the thing that I always find lacking in these discussions is a cost/benefit analysis. Yes, C++ will let you do things like that, and they will absolutely allow you to wring every last drop of performance out of what you're doing.
But, if you aren't in a situation where optimizing to that extent is cost-effective, and you're working in a business domain where frequent heap allocation of short-lived objects is what you do, so that idiomatic, standard C++'s default way of doing things is known to generally be not significantly better, and often slower, than some of the faster GC languages, then it's just possible that that you should go for the pragmatic option.
On the other hand, empirically, it is not unusual to see straightforward C programs being dramatically faster than comparable C++ programs written in enterprise style, and to also build much faster.
> Last but not least, you would have to be a masochist to write heavily multi-threaded code in C
You have to be a masochist to write heavily multi-threaded code that uses a lot of ad-hoc synchronization with mutexes and atomics. As it turns out, for many many tasks, it's also a spectacular bad way to go about parallelization, because mutexes are the _opposite_ of parallelization.
As a rule of thumb, do coarse-grained concurrency. Install a few queues, come up with a job system, and it won't be hard to get parallization right in plain C at all. Writing in C is often a good idea because what's a bad idea to do on hardware coincedes pretty well with what is painful to write.
Your only comparison cases are cases where the code in question was re-written in C. This most likely means that everyone already knew it was slow and so the re-write also fixed the fundamental problems. If the code had been rewritten in C++ it would also be faster - and since C++ allows some optimizations C doesn't it would be even faster. (it is known that if you switch from gcc to g++ your code often will run faster if it compiles)
There is a reason for enterprise style C++. Most of the time it is still fast enough, and it is a lot more maintainable.
I've never heard such a claim, can you back it up? And what does it say about the language?
> and it is a lot more maintainable
If you equate "maintainable" = readable, I've never once seen maintainable enterprise code. Everything is a convoluted mess that never gets anything done. Probably I haven't worked at the best shops, but then again, where are those? And why doesn't the language help mediocre programmers to write maintainable code?
I suspect that maintainability is almost exclusively a function of experience, not the programming language used. Experienced programmers do seem to agree that C-style C++ or even plain C is the way to go.
> And what does it say about the language?
C++ has a stronger type system. This is already known. You avoid a few bugs in C++ because of this. The type system isn't nearly as strong as Haskell.
> I've never once seen maintainable enterprise code. Everything is a convoluted mess that never gets anything done
Two sides of the same coin. While the code is convoluted, it often is doing a lot of things in a generic way. More straightforward code is possible, but only by created a lot more code, and quantity is itself convolution.
> And why doesn't the language help mediocre programmers to write maintainable code?
It does. However you have to be careful here. C++ is often used for very large problems that are also complex. I would never use python for something that is over 100,000 lines of code as you can't change anything anymore for fear that some case isn't covered in the tests and so you won't see that syntax error until months later. I maintain 15 million lines of C++ (and this isn't the largest C++ codebase I know of).
Not, I'm not arguing that C++ is a great language. It has a lot of inconsistencies, and foot guns. However it is still the best language I know for very large, very complex programs. (Note that I do not know ADA or Rust, two that often come up in context of very large, very complex programs. I would not be surprised if they are better. That C++ is better known that others is itself an advantage to C++)
> I suspect that maintainability is almost exclusively a function of experience, not the programming language used.
Sort of. As I said before languages like Python are out of the running for very large programs because they are not compiled and so you can get runtime errors. There are also intentionally impossible to write languages that we can throw out even sooner. However there are for sure other languages that can play in the very large program space. So long as we limit ourself to languages that play in the very large program space, experience is the largest factor.
It was 40 years of throwing UB optimizations at it, that made its current performance come true.
This is nothing special, any language can eventually reach that reality with similar investment.
Well then, don't use zero-terminated strings for proper string processing. You don't have to use zero-termination, even when some programmers in the 70s and 80s were convinced enough of it that abominations like strtok() landed in the standard.
You can choose between zero-termination and having to convert strings back and forth when using idiomatic libraries.
"A magnitude faster" for doing what? Typical usages of zero-terminated strings are performance-uncritical. And note that zero-terminated doesn't preclude using separate length fields.
Sane programs use store length of strings explicitly where strings get longer and/or performance is a concern, just as it is the case with other types of arrays.
Is it? I've been programming strings for 45 years now. Including on 8 and 10 bit machines. All that space efficiency goes out the window when one wants a subset of a string that isn't a common tail.
The simplicity goes out the window as soon as you want a substring that isn't a common tail. Now you have memory allocation to deal with.
The performance goes out the window because now the entire string contents has to be loaded into the cache to determine its length.
> length-prefixed
Are worse. Which is why I didn't mention them.
> Sane programs use store length
Meaning they become length-delineated programs, except it's done manually, tediously, and error-prone.
Whenever I review C code, the first thing I look at are the strlen/strncpy/str** sequences. It's almost always got a bug in it, an off-by-one error.
No, I recommend everyone to use whatever fits the situation best. It might be a 2 byte start index and a 1 byte length fields that expresses the length as a multiple of 12 bytes. It might be rope data structure. Or it might be whatever. "String" is not a super well defined thing, and I don't understand why everybody is so super concerned about a canonical string data type. String data types are for scripting languages. 99% of my usage of string (literals) is just printf and opening files, and C does these just fine.
Zero terminated strings are only a default thing for string literals that does indeed bring a little bit of simplicity and convenience (no need for a builtin string type and the associated bike shedding, and only need to pass a single pointer to functions like printf).
> Meaning they become length-delineated programs, except it's done manually, tediously, and error-prone.
Not sure when is the last time I found it "manually, tediously, and error-prone". There are very rare cases where I have to construct zero-terminated strings from code, or need to strlen() something because of an API. And even when these cases occur they don't bother me at all. Stuff just works for me generally and I'm moving on. I have probably 500 stupid bugs unrelated to string handling before I once forget a zero terminator, and when that one time happens I just fix it and move on. On the plus side, given that we're in C where there are no slice types, zero-terminated strings spare me to pass extra length values for format strings or filepaths.
Sometimes I envision being able to use slices but I have some concerns if that would be an actual improvement. Importantly it should be about arrays and not just about strings. Strings are arrays, they aren't special.
I think a good design for slices could be one whose length can never be accessed by the programmer, but which can be used for automated bounds checks. Keeping size/capacity/offset and 43 cursors into whatever buffers separate is actually correct in my view from a modularization standpoint, because "String <-> Index/Size/Offset etc." isn't a 1:1 relationship.
> Whenever I review C code, the first thing I look at are the strlen/strncpy/str* sequences. It's almost always got a bug in it, an off-by-one error.
You will have to look quite a bit to find strlen() or strncpy() in my code. I'm not advocating for them, and not advocating to build serious string processing on top of zero-terminated strings.
> You will have to look quite a bit to find strlen() or strncpy() in my code. I'm not advocating for them, and not advocating to build serious string processing on top of zero-terminated strings.
Rolling your own string mechanism is simply not a strength of C. The downside of rolling your own is it is incompatible with everyone else's notion of how to avoid using 0 termination.
Instead, I might have many string-ish types. A type to hold strings in the UI (may include layout information!), a type of string slice that points into some binary buffer, a rope string type to use in my editor, a fixed-size string as part of some message payload, a string-builder string that tries to be fast without imposing a fixed length... Again, there is little point in an "optimized" generic string type for systems programming, because... generic and optimized is a contradiction.
If you want to do a quick debug printf() on it, well, you could use %.*s, but it's awkward and ugly (I speak from lots of experience). Otherwise, you gotta append the zero.
I'm not a C newbie. I've been programming C for 40 years now. I've written 2 professional C compilers, the most recent one I finished this year. When I started D, a major priority was doing strings a better way, as C ranks among the most inconvenient string processing languages :-)
I don't care about having to provide zero-terminated strings to OS and POSIX APIs, because somehow I almost always have the zero already. Maybe I'm a magician.
Sometimes I have not, but >99% of what I give to printf is actually "text", and that pretty much always has the zero anyway. It's a C convention, you might not like it, but I don't sweat it.
If I want to "print", or rather "write", something other than a zero-terminated string, which is normally "binary data", I use... fwrite() or something analogous.
> C ranks among the most inconvenient string processing languages
I've written my share of parser and interpreters (including also a dysfunctional toy compiler with x64 assembler backend, but doesn't matter here), so I'm not entirely a stranger to this game either.
I find parsing strings in C is extremely _easy_, and I find it in fact easier than say in Python where going through a stream of characters one-by-one feels surprisingly unpythonic.
Writing a robust, human-friendly parser with good error reporting and some nice recovery attributes is on the harder side, but that has nothing to do with C strings. A string input for the average parser isn't even required, you just read char by char, frankly I don't understand what you're doing that is hard about it. It doesn't matter one bit if there's a zero at the end or not.
Second, you're talking about memory allocation, and this is arguably orthogonal to the string representations we're discussing here. Whether you make a copy or not for example totally depends on your specific situation. The same considerations arise for any array or slice type.
Third, again, you're free to make substrings using pointer + length or whatever, and this is in many cases the best solution. I could even agree that format strings should have better standardized support for explicit length, but it's really not a pain point for me. I'm only stating that zero-terminated is an acceptable default for string literals, and I want to stress this with another example: Last time you were looking at a binary using your editor or pager, how much better has your experience been thanks to NUL terminators? This argument can also extend to runtime debugging somewhat.
A substringz cannot be produced from a stringz without doing an allocation.
> you're free to make substrings using pointer + length or whatever, and this is in many cases the best solution
Right, I can. And it's an ongoing nuisance in C to do so, because it doesn't have proper abstractions to build new types with. Even worse, if I switch my stringz to length delimited, and then pass it to fopen() which wants a stringz, I have to convert my length delimited string to stringz even though it is already a stringz. Because my length delimited API has no mechanism to say it also is 0 terminated.
You wind up with two string representations in your code, and then what? Have each string function come in a pair?
Believe me, I've done this stuff, I've thought about it a lot, and there is no happy solution. It annoys me enough that C is just not a tool I want to reach for anymore. I'm just tired of ugly, buggy C string code.
The good news is there is a fix, and I've proposed it, but it gets zero traction:
As said, I don't think this is the end of the world, and I'm likely to add a number of other string representations. While it happens rarely, I don't worry about formatting a temporary string for an API into a temporary before calling it. Because most "string" things are small and dispensable. Zero-terminated strings are the cheap plastic solution that just works for submitting string-literals to printf, and that just works to view directly in a binary. And they're compatible with length delineated in the sense that you can supply a (cheap plastic) zero-terminated string to a (more serious) length delineated API. Also the other way, many length delineated APIs are designed to work with both - supply -1 as length, and you can happily put a string literal as argument, don't even have to macro your way with sizeof then to supply the right length.
> The good news is there is a fix, and I've proposed it, but it gets zero traction
I'm aware of this and I like it ("fat pointers") but I wouldn't like it if the APIs would miss the explicit length argument because there's a size field glued to the slice.
I'm sorry, I just have to say "no thanks" to that. I don't really want each string function to test the length and run strlen if it isn't there.
By now, the D community has 20 years experience with length as part of the string type. Nobody wants to go back to the C way. It's probably the most unambiguously successful and undisputed feature of D. C code that gets converted to D gets scrubbed of the stringz code, and the result is cleaner and faster.
D still interfaces with C and C strings. The conversion is done as the last step before calling the C function. (There's a clever way to add a 0 that only rarely requires an allocation.) Any C strings returned get immediately converted with the slice idiom:
string s = p[0 .. strlen(p)];
I bet you would like it! (Another problem with a separate length field is there's no obvious connection between it and the string - which is another source of bugs.)
Not perceptibly better. And yeah, I do look at binary dumps now and then, after all, I wrote the code that generates ELF, OMF, MachO, and MSCOFF object file formats, and librarians for them :-)
Similarly, the text we're exchanging consists of words and sentences that are terminated using not zero bytes, but other terminators. I'm very happy that they're not length delineated.
Yeah, it will. For a related example, I use `grep` all the time to find strings in source code. Source code is not 0 terminated. It works fine.
When you're processing actual buffers full of text or binary data, and performance matters, of course you are not advised to use an in-band signaled sentinel like zero-terminator is. Use an explicit length for those cases.
The length is known statically, but whether the index is in-bounds may not be.
The binary search GP talks about is exactly one such case, go on Godbolt, write up a simple binary search (with a static size so you get code), and you’ll see that the compiler checks against the literal array size on every iteration.
And what is the runtime cost of all the mitigations put in place because we don't use a memory safe language? Stack canaries, safe stacks, ASLR, control flow integrity, code pointer integrity, runtime attestation, library re-linking and randomization. Not to mention sandboxing techniques and other system level mitigations.
I suppose I should thank the C language for job security as a security engineer.
If your transistor/cost curve has a doubling time of 3 years, 156 weeks. A 5% difference is approximately 11 weeks.
If your transistor/cost curve has a doubling time of 2 years, a 5% difference is approximately 8 weeks.
How fast do we have to get before safety is table stakes? Focusing on raw unsafe speed wouldn't be a normalized metric in any other industry. I'll spend 8-11 weeks of performance gains on correctness.
C was an inside job.
First it's up to the programmer to put them in. Then hopefully the compiler will optimize away the unneeded ones. If the programmer though biffs and forgets then oops. And of course classically we blame the programmer not the system he's been forced to work under.
That seems like a reasonable thing in 1982. Which is 40 years ago.
It would be better if the compiler implemented the checks automagically and removed ones it knows it doesn't need. And bonus, if the programmer puts one in, leave it alone.
To be devil’s advocate and take the other side of this argument: I would rather the CPU I paid for spend its cycles performing actual application logic. Every cycle spent executing all this “safety code” overhead feels like me having to pay for a developer’s sloppiness.
I feel end users pay a high cost for all this runtime checking and all these frameworks and levels of abstraction.
And second, would you really rather deal with security holes on an on-going basis?
The problem with C is not that you can write unsafe code in it, it is that the design of the language -- and pointer aliasing in particular -- makes it impossible to perform even basic sanity checks at compile time [EDIT: or even at run-time for that matter]. For example:
int x[10];
...
int y = x[11];
In any sane language, that would be a trivially-checkable compile-time error. But in C it is not because there are all kinds of things that could legally happen where the ellipses are that would make this code not violate any of C's safety constraints. That is the problem with C, and it is a fundamental problem with C's design, that it conflates pointers and arrays. C was designed for a totally different world, and it is broken beyond repair.
[0] Ok, I guess you could #define x something, but that's not interesting from a static analysis perspective.
The issue is when you pass the array to another function, it can't track the size without changing the ABI.
Indeed the `-Werror` option is often a good thing to have (though I don't set it by default on my free software projects, because other people might use other compilers with different warnings, and I don't want to block them outright).
Rust's compiler will reject programs unless it can prove them to be valid. C compilers will accept programs unless they can prove them to be invalid. But then C warnings can lead to an indeterminate state: code that looks iffy may be rejected, but we've not necessarily proven that the code is wrong. We're still trusting the programmers' claim that code which may exhibit undefined behaviour with certain inputs won't ever receive those inputs.
I don’t really love forcing errors; when a program is “under construction” you should be able to act like it is and not have to clean up all the incomplete parts. It also annoys people testing new compilers against your code.
Another problem with C. There's way too much implementation-dependent behavior.
However I do get spurious warnings, such as mixing arithmetic and bitwise operations even in cases where that's intended. Pleasing every compiler is not trivial.
int z[20];
x = z;
because arrays were formally equivalent to int*'s.
But apparently things have changed since the last time I looked.
It is also worth considering that there is nothing preventing C compilers from inserting compile time checks to address examples such as yours. I just tried to compile a similar example in gcc and it does catch the unsafe code with warnings and the optimizer turned on.
Yes, that's true. So? The original claim is that it is self-evident that this tradeoff should be resolved in favor of performance in the design of the language, and it just isn't (self-evident). If anything, it is self-evident to me that the tradeoff should be resolved in favor of safety in today's world.
Especially when to get the compiler to do the right thing safely you need to add manual bounds checking with the expectation that the compiler will optimise it away, but without any mechanism to ensure that it actually happens.
It depends greatly on the problem at hand, but there are definitely cases where even with a dynamic array size we can unroll our loop such that we check bounds less than once per iteration.
There is an asymmetrical risk here. On one hand the compile might emit checks that aren't needed. On the other that the programmer will fail to insert a check that is needed.
The problem is that for CPU programming errors are application logic too and they are run, cf. protected memory. You don't run everything in ring0 do you?
Yes, they can defeat a few classes of exploits, but generally not the ones that lead to really bad outcomes.
> ~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues
Memory safety is a leading source of serious bugs in a big group of operating systems, browsers, image and file parsers, and more.
It does seem likely we can stop this, and it doesn’t seem likely to me we can fix it in C. We have tried and failed for years at that.
Hardware memory tagging, the language itself is beyond hope.
How is this not a win? We only have so many decisions we can make per day.
Unlike general purpose languages WUFFS has a very specific purpose (Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely) so it doesn't need to worry that it can't solve some of your problems, which frees it to completely refuse to do stuff that's unsafe, while going real, real fast.
WUFFS gets to completely omit bounds checks, which you probably wouldn't have dared try in C because it's so obviously unsafe, but WUFFS already proved at compile time that it can't ever have bounds misses so it needn't do these checks. WUFFS gets to also omit integer overflow checks, because again it proved at compile time that your code is correct and cannot overflow for any input. And since WUFFS knows how big the data is at all times it gets to automatically generate loop unrolling and suchlike accelerations.
WUFFS isn't a general purpose language, it doesn't have strings, it doesn't have growable arrays (what C++ calls "vectors"), it doesn't have any dynamic memory allocation, but then we weren't talking about how much you love general purpose features, we were talking about safety preventing security bugs. Which is exactly what WUFFS does.
Runtime mitigations exist to mitigate some of the latent risk associated with programming in unsafe programming languages. We use them because they're our best known approach to continuing to use those languages without letting script kiddies own us like it's 1993.
On the other hand what computer security people worry about a lot is that the web browsers made by reputable organizations and teams of competent programmers nevertheless contain security flaws that can be exploited by a maliciously-written website to cause those browsers to do unexpected and dangerous things.
Many of those security flaws in otherwise well-regarded software are due to memory management errors that just aren't present in safer languages, or they're due to type errors that wouldn't be present in more type-safe languages.
There are some implementation bugs that could be present in any language no matter how many safety features it has, but many security bugs aren't due to, say, an incorrectly specified algorithm, they're due to the programmer asking the computer to do something that's literally nonsense, like asking for the fourth element of a list that only has three elements, or recording that someone's age is apricot. Programming languages with powerful nonsense filters can remove a lot of those kinds of security bugs. (And powerful type systems often give programmers mechanisms to tell the compiler more about the program so that it can filter out more kinds of nonsense than it would otherwise.)
Obviously there's a lot of little details you'd have to work out. Like how to make such a trusted compiler in the first place, and how to sandbox unsafe code and legacy applications that were compiled by an untrusted compiler.
If this seems like it's far-fetched or too much work, consider what lengths high-performance hardware devices like HPC network interfaces go to avoid system calls at all costs, to the point where applications talk to the hardware directly. Is that really a sustainable practice long term? And how can anyone audit the security of such hardware devices?
That's pretty much how the Amiga worked, and that level of technology achievement is still unsurpassed today.
I'm pretty sure the discovery of Meltdown/Spectre and similar speculative execution attacks would completely wreck this model. The fix for those exploits has been to make the isolation barriers even stronger but if you don't have them at all you're wide open. If you had such an OS but then had to split it back into separate address spaces you've now lost the performance gains and just have a slower OS that is harder to develop drivers for.
I'm sorry, but the C language toolchain is not great. The only part of the C language toolchain that is good is it's platform support. Every platform has a C compiler.
However, that's hardly something most devs will care about. At this point, we are pretty much all targeting Arm or x86 (Sorry PIC and MIPS devs). And every new language that's cropped up at a minimum supports both those platforms and the major OSes for those platforms.
So once you dismiss that point, what are you left with? Tools for catching memory leaks? Well, sorry, but pretty much every language has those tools and better. Particularly GCed languages. Profiling tools? Debug tools? To say the C debug tools are "good" is to say you've not used any other toolchain.
But let's also point out C's horror story that is "dependency management and building". How do you grab dependencies for and build javascript? npm install, npm build. How about C? Well... are you using auto tools? Cmake? Ninja? Scion? makefiles? etc... Oh, and how do you get dependencies? Well, hope you like reading readme files and decipher cryptic "symbol not found xyz" compiler errors.
Suffice it to say C's toolchain isn't anything to be proud of. It's a relic of the 70s that to this day gets in the way because the community has practically given up on the idea of fixing the glaring issues (Too hard, everything already depends on X working the way X does).
So why risk switching languages? Well, because the C toolchain is a dumpster fire and you likely aren't trying to write new code for IBM RPG servers.
Please take a few days to review John Regehr’s excellent blog. I’m certain that you’ll find dispelling your ignorance rewarding.
> How do you grab dependencies for and build javascript? npm install, npm build.
Npm is the poster child for supply chain attacks.
Haven't heard of him but will certainly give a read. Thanks for the heads up.
> Npm is the poster child for supply chain attacks.
The only reason C doesn't (often) have similar supply chain attacks is because pulling in dependencies is so hard that you aren't likely to end up with a 10k dependency project.
Hard to say that's really a plus.
Other ecosystems have their own problems and certainly aren't perfect. However, the toolchains are generally leaps and bounds ahead of what C currently has.
Or the lack of canonical package manager means the developer has to actually spend time to inspect the quality of each dependency instead of `npm install is-odd`ing like there is no tomorrow.
It also acts as a "filter" to prevent adding complexity to the dependency tree.
> Hard to say that's really a plus.
I'll definitely call that a plus. All dependencies introduce risk. Sure, we can't avoid all dependencies, but carefully evaluating them and keeping the list small is a big win for maintainability and security.
If a random library has a 0.1% chance of having malicious code (I'd say it's more like 1%, but let's be generous), a 10K-dependency program is guaranteed to be pulling in at least something malicious.
You can't trust HN comments. Most of them sound good to laymen. But to a trained eye, it's a comment tree of cards.
Like it or not, a problem C has is that it's pretty much impossible to determine why a piece of memory is currently being retained. Tools like valgrind and jemalloc can give you good starting points but really can't point to issues where "This memory is being retained because of this linked list over here"
Languages with GCs can, at any point, dump the heap and provide tools for analyzing that heap to point to the exact reason why a bit of memory is currently being retained.
That's not really "blind" praise of GCed languages, simply a fact of how they operate.
I think there’s a wide open research space to work on taming the aliasing problem. There are PhDs to be had, and maybe even Turing awards.
[1] C gets to cheat a little bit here because Unix and friends are its runtime.
Agreed. And with my critique of the toolchain, I didn't mean to imply that C isn't a reasonable choice in many situations. But rather, holding up the C toolchain as a reason to pick C over an alternative isn't reasonable in my opinion.
In particular, because a lot of C alternatives piggy back on the C ecosystem by using LLVM as a backend. So you end up with a superset of tools. The C alternative ecosystem and the C ecosystem.
Pick C if it's all that's available. Pick it if you plan on distributing your app/lib onto that IBM RPG server. Pick it if your software is already written in C. Pick it if your software is a simple app that runs for 1 second then shuts down (and it isn't really mission critical). Pick it if memory safety isn't really a problem. Pick it if that ultra thin runtime is an absolute necessity. Pick it if you have a bunch of C devs that don't want to learn a new language.
But don't pick it because you are afraid new languages won't have something as good as valgrind or gdb. Any semi-popular language born in the last 20 years (that wasn't written yesterday) will almost certainly have better tooling than C.
Just a heads up, this reads to me as condescending.
I regularly read his blog and I found nothing to back you up. He mostly work on a generic compiler toolchain (LLVM) other than C-specific tools and his work easily translates to many other languages using LLVM. And even a rare C-specific tool like C-Reduce is not that hard to adapt for other languages; C-Reduce is actually language-agnostic and works well for many other curly-brace languages as well.
Hey, I know that! Challenge accep... Eeeeh, nevermind.
Zig's `zig cc` is a killer feature that doesn't even require using Zig-the-language at all. `zig cc` is an LLVM-based C compiler that gives you trivial cross-compilation for existing C codebases, adds effective caching, and can be easily installed on most operating systems with `tar -xzf`.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...
pip install ziglang
python -m ziglangI stopped reading here. This is like saying typing speed doesn't matter because most of your time is spent thinking about what to type. If your argument basically evaluates to saying that it doesn't matter how productive you are while doing the actual activity of your job itself... at some point it's like, I dunno, do you actually believe what you're saying?
Also, not to go off on too unrelated/unhinged a tangent, but, I've also started noticing in the last five years this widespread fear of actually sitting down and programming. There's a weird meta-culture where people want to do anything but sit down and write code, because it's hard and scary. I hear arguments made all the time for how important everything is — aligning stakeholders, scoping tasks, communication, mentoring juniors, soft skills, whatever. Everything except writing the actual code, which is somehow a mere technical triviality that anyone can do, or something.
We have all of these tools that help us to write code while making few mistakes. From constrained DSLs/configuration languages, schemas, static typing to automated tests etc. But in the end we still have to exert all that energy to sit down, focus and do the coding.
Meetings, design, coordination etc. All of those things are important, and they can be exhausting in their own way. But programming is by far the most challenging, hour per hour (pound for pound). Making all of these micro decisions, think about the impact of your code, the readability, the correctness. It is _at least_ two times harder and more draining than anything else I do, even when I'm in a flow state and the actual work is fun, more fun than all of the other tasks.
And I agree: It is the most important thing. I mean all of the other stuff is basically there to support the core task that solves your problems: producing working software (except if it isn't but then you have political problems). There are seemingly infinite dimensions for improvement as well, tradeoffs such as performance, efficiency, robustness, usability, leverage, creativity...
I’ve programmed in C for 20+ years and then recently switched to rust. When fellow C programmers ask me how Rust is going, I say “it’s modern” and “it’s consistent”. What I mean by that unlike C, Rust doesn’t have 50 years of baggage: string functions that handle null termination all differently, complicated implicit promotion rules, null-terminated strings that haven’t been a good idea for decades, apis that we’re completely busted by posix threads but still exist, functions that cannot be used safely that still exist, code snippet examples with horribly broken unsafe code that beginners copy-paste, dubious and bad type-based aliasing, rampant use of UB, etc etc etc
Sadly Rust is not a better C. Maybe it’ll grow into one some day. Today it’s a better C++. Sadly I’d still chose C to do C’s job.
All I want from “better C” is to fix the obviously bad problems from C’s history. Or rather, maybe that’s the committee’s job.
At any rate: it’s embarrassing that we’re still so dependent on a language that’s so broken. And it’s sad that there doesn’t seem to be a path forward.
1. C language toolchain -- No specifics (save static analyzers, ... because C needs static analyzers to catch C specific bugs...). What do you actually feel you're missing? Most of these "new C" languages use the same backend as a C compiler. What can't you use?
2., 3., and 4. -- Just chicken and egg FUD.
Not to mention it's "'Better X' doesn't matter" fundamentally doesn't understand the competition.
A sample quote: "That's not just one but eight(!) killer features (re: Java). How many of those unique selling points do the C alternatives have? Less than Java did at least!" WTF?! "But Java had 8!" is laughable.
Another: "[A]ny safety checks put into the competing language will have a runtime cost, which often is unacceptable". We can also produce a car without windows, doors or a chassis that will survive a crash, and it may be faster too. We may even get lucky and live to tell the tale.
Again: "Aside from Jai, is anyone C alternative really looking to pursue having killer features?" Aside from Jai?! Jai. Really? Oh, I remember you just discounted safety and correctness as killer features. ... But Jai. And nothing against Jai. But a language which hasn't been, which may never be, released to the general public. Just, eyes wide open, wow.
I hope this is the peak of anti-Rust/pro-C silliness, but I know it's not.
I don't know why you say 2-4 is FUD.
It explicitly says in the post... for example static analyzers. What is the "Frama-C" equivalent of any language that bills itself as a replacement / competitor of C?
> Most of these "new C" languages use the same backend as a C compiler.
Most of them use LLVM as far as I know, which does not target plenty of obscure platforms.
> Most of them use LLVM as far as I know, which does not target plenty of obscure platforms.
Yeah, writing software in the old language is more convenient on obscure, rare, niche platforms, because it's older than dirt. More chicken and egg nonsense. It's not impossible to have LLVM add additional targets, right?
It seems like you're being needlessly hostile. There is nothing personal about this discussion, and it's not nonsense. I write embedded software that needs to run on PIC18 microcontrollers. Support for that in LLVM was dropped about 8 years ago. Do you think it's reasonable to say to someone "just add a new LLVM target, it's not literally impossible"?
I'm profoundly disappointed. This article's reasoning is not good.
> Do you think it's reasonable to say to someone "just add a new LLVM target, it's not literally impossible"?
No, but that C is already pervasive because it's been around 50 years isn't a case "against an alternative to C" as much as it is a headwind. That's fair. C has a massive head start and no one should discount that. But I'm not exactly certain that was the argument he was making.
If you can't use Rust because of your specific circumstances that's ok - use C! But don't use "my current circumstances prevent me from using Rust" as an argument as an argument against Rust in general - which is what you're doing.
First of all I'm just summarizing the article, I'm in no way arguing against people using Rust. The article itself argues against C alternatives, and explicitly describes Rust as a C++ alternative. So the article is not even arguing against Rust! If we can't agree on such a basic reading of the article, it just seems like we're going to pointlessly talk past each other in the comments.
It's a position paper meant to sketch out the negative space that a viable C replacement can't meaningfully compete in, so that its designers can focus attention on things that actually add value. If you don't acknowledge your enemy's strengths, you'll never really be able to fight them.
Yeah, I get it and I'm not sure it does that job well enough to be taken seriously.
> Memory allocation, array and string handling are often tricky, but with the right libraries and a sound memory strategy, it can be minimized.
Such a handwavy deflection. Parsing strings in C is a joke and also a minefield bursting with vulnerabilities. And if you use null terminated strings (which you are, let’s face it) it’s slow.
(strncpy doesn't 0-terminate when it hit max length, nor stop when it sees its first 0 in the source buffer; it acts almost entirely like memcpy except that it writes zeroes to the full length of the destination upon seeing a zero in the source. This is allegedly useful for populating fixed-sized buffers in historical Unix, and can plausibly be useful for writing out tar headers, but in practice very little code in the wild does anything observably different if you #define strncpy memcpy.)
I don't we should stop trying to improve just because an existing solution exists, especially in the space of systems programming which has barely moved in decades
The truth is, parsing strings in C is as easy as in any other language. You have a string array and a length field, and you scrub through it from left to right with a cursor. Done.
What you do not get in C is creating lots of string objects willy-nilly, and concatenating them with a plus sign, like you do in scripting languages.
You can strap basically any language on top of the C ABI. Many contender languages either use it natively or offer low-cost/no-cost C ABI bindings, specifically as its the lingua franca ABI.
You can check (5) off your list if your choice of replacement language has easy C ABI interop.
[edit]
(1) isn't particularly relevant either. These days the tooling for detecting memory leaks, data races, bugs, etc, operates at the debug info (DAWRF/dSYM) level. It doesn't matter what compiler or input language generated the debugging information, the tools should work just fine. You can run valgrind on your Rust binary for instance. [1] Is there any such tooling that specifically depends on the input source being C? I guess some static analysis tools?
[1] https://nnethercote.github.io/2022/01/05/rust-and-valgrind.h...
A platform will define an ABI which, as I understand it, explains how parameters are passed to and returned from a "function", what types are supported and how they're encoded, at the processor register and stack level.
C, being the "portable assembler" [1] that it is, maps its types and functions pretty easily to that platform ABI, but I've been seeing a fair amount of confusion about that ABI being about C rather than any language that can link through that platform ABI. Couldn't it just as easily be called, I dunno, the Ada ABI?
[1] not really, except for the sake of this argument
C with:
- bounds checking
- use after free checks
- modules
- sane metaprograming/template
- tagged union built in
without:
- macro
- pre declaration
- split header/source
That's it, no borrow checker, no weird syntax, no nothing
So far D is the answser for me, but i'm worried about its future, will they keep improve the language in that direction? or will they continue with their high level stuff
Zig/Jai/Odin so far are looking interesting, the problem is they all depart from the C syntax, wich is annoying, the only syntax i'd like to change is the primitive type, i32/f32/size/usize, and that's it, no need more
I have pondered forking tinycc and using that as a startpoint for a more conservative set of changes like you describe. It would limit the amount of work to be done and lead to something useable quite quickly.
Also no language server is a hard pass, tooling is important
Whenever a CVE is discussed, even if the code was from Google, Microsoft, or Apple, commenters immediately point out that these companies must have hired some "bad programmers", because a "good programmer" wouldn't have made such mistake. Given that even top software companies continue producing CVEs on a regular basis, there is a shortage of people capable of writing C.
A lot of programming skills are transferable (algorithms, architecture, system APIs, debugging), so you don't really need to hire "language X programmer".
> It turns out that people don't always agree on what the pain points with C is.
People have different problems so they should probably use different languages. Don't even try to make a language that will solve everyone's problems.
> Also, while the company has experience recruiting for C developers, it doesn't know how to recruit for this new language.
If the language is so hard that people have to have special knowledge to use it and can't learn it quickly then it's probably not a good language.
> For a business it's whether despite the downsides the language can help the bottom line: "Is this valuable enough to outweigh the downsides?"
Exactly, it's solving real problems that matters.
> The "build it and they will come" idea is tempting to believe in
A better idea is "build it and we will come because we need it. Then maybe other people will come if they need it too."
This is completely wrong. The best counterexample is probably ATS http://www.ats-lang.org which is compatible with C, yet also features dependent types (allowing us to prove arbitrary statements about our programs, and check them at compile time) and linear type (allowing us to precisely track resource usage; similar to Rust)
A good example is http://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/ATS2CAIRO/HTML/c36.... which uses the Cairo graphics library, and ends with the following:
> It may seem that using cairo functions in ATS is nearly identical to using them in C (modulo syntatical difference). However, what happens at the level of typechecking in ATS is far more sophisticated than in C. In particular, linear types are assigned to cairo objects (such as contexts, surfaces, patterns, font faces, etc.) in ATS to allow them to be tracked statically, that is, at compile-time, preventing potential mismanagement of such objects. For instance, if the following line:
val () = cairo_surface_destroy (sf) // a type error if omitted
In the end, though, you can accomplish the same (from an outcome perspective, not necessarily from a satisfactory one) in all of them, so I try not to be overly biased, although convenience vs correctness seem to be the main issues at play here.
(Edit: why the downvotes? Is Zig out of favor? Is it because this may read as a slight on Rust?)
I’d like to use Zig a bit more, but the standard library is still going through some significant changes (it seems) which makes it slightly harder to commit to at the moment.
In general I wonder if some of these languages would actually benefit from Jai’s approach of deferring availability until the language is ready. While getting early adopters is great for getting feedback early, it can also disuade potential users that try the language before its ready and decide to leave it alone as a result.
This is hard to describe without getting deep into Rust details, but I think the ability to encapsulate unsafe code in safe APIs is just as important as what pure safe code can do. (Of course those two things end up being intimately related.)
Seems like this might be a good place to ask: which of the C replacement languages mentioned (or not mentioned) support inline assembly? Do any of them do it better than GCC/Clang? For me, I feel like the ability to drop to assembly in a pinch is a necessary feature. I'm sure I could technically get by linking an external file, but I'd be more interested in a language with inline ASM support than one that doesn't allow it. Thanks!
Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/reference/inline-assembly....
D: https://dlang.org/spec/iasm.html
Ada: https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugn-docs/html/gnat_ugn/gnat_ug...
Cobol: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.2?topic=appendixes-a...
Pascal: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Asm
Python: https://pypi.org/project/il/
You can almost name a language and find a route to inline assembly :D
Zig: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Assembly
Odin: Looks like it's a dead language, but it was on the docket. https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/misc/roadmap.m...
Jai: https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki/...
eC: No clue. Not a great name for googling.
C is great mostly because it's easy to learn, and it has many other advantages.
I dislike all those new languages because they have too many features, and they're non trivial to learn.
I've looked at some rust codebases and I don't think there will be a lot of people who will want to maintain them. Rust is difficult, even though it's an awesome language.
A language that could compete with C would:
* Be fast to compile
* Have some quality of life things you can find in the C++ STL: map, string, etc
* Look a lot like C, meaning it would not try to innovate too much.
To summarize, it would be a lighter version of C++.
What exactly do you mean? Learn the basics? Become productive? Memorize the entire specification? I'd argue C isn't significantly faster at any of these than most other languages.
The "difficulty bar" must be low. This is why english is a popular language.
> I'd argue C isn't significantly faster at any of these than most other languages.
Yes it is. It has a lot of flaws, but it's popular for all those other reasons.
A "better C" language doesn't have to "win the popularity race" to be useful, it just needs to (a) be easy to learn coming from C, (b) integrate well into the existing C/C++/ObjC ecosystem, and (c) easy to install and across all supported platforms.
A "better C" cannot and should not replace C for all use cases, but it should at least augment C by fixing its design wart.
The actually depressing thing is the "winner takes all" mentality though that seems to be prelevant in the programming world.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
There's an oversupply of enthusiastic engineers trying to provide C alternatives and it's creating massive bike-shedding and yak-shaving problems.
Language designers are encouraged to give a presentation if it's about building quality software using a language. Otherwise, no.
The biggest culprit I've met on this front is the POSIX stat family of functions.
This is true for both software and hardware. There have been plenty of leaps and bounds such as SSD speeds compared to HDD speeds; but even there, SSDs will not supplant HDDs until there is price parity between the two technologies. Until then, data will be stored on SSD when fast access is critical and on HDD when there is too much of it to justify the cost.
Getting a company to switch operating systems, database vendors, or cloud providers is likewise an uphill battle. They don't call them 'walled gardens' for nothing.
I am building a new data management system that I think is much better than file systems at storing and managing unstructured data and better than RDBMS at managing structured data; but I wouldn't have even dreamed of starting the project if I wasn't confident that it was at least 2x better at a minimum.
I realize that this is radical, but if people could work with me on this, this could solve all your problems, no really, it could solve all your problems. And if it can't solve all your problems yet, then modify it to
https://cboard.cprogramming.com/c-programming/181160-hi-i-ha...
There is no need for another language. Just use this
Gregory
In terms of relying on tested and supported infrastructure lots of these projects use llvm.
Why do people keep lumping Rust into the category of a "C++ alternative". Rust is a C alternative and can be used places that C can but C++ cannot. i.e the linux kernal and baremetal silicon (C++ can be used in the embedded but I've never heard of it being used without modification for that environment).
> My language (C3) is fairly recent, there are others: Zig, Odin, Jai and older languages like eC.
Further he seems to claim that Jai is a C alternative when it's explicitly described by it's creator as a C++ alternative.
To fragment the industry with more languages is a hidden cost that wont end well for anyone.
KWh is approaching $1, prepare by choosing the proper languages.
This one is the main point. Highest possible speed while consuming as little resource as possible. Put in checks, and most of those checks will run redundantly compromising performance.
-- Fran Allen, from Coders at Work
How about all guarantees static analysis brings to data races, memory ownership, etc? No runtime cost. C tools do not bring this.
We've known for decades that compiler mitigations, fuzz testing, and dynamic instrumentation are excellent and necessary components of writing more secure C. But they don't secure C programs, because C itself is fundamentally unsafe.
> No, they're not static tools but being dynamic has a host of advantages too.
Advantages that any compiled binary can enjoy.
The rust implementation was much less code than the C version. It generated a bigger assembly but it ran 20% faster or so. (I don't know why it ran faster than the C version - this was before the noalias analysis was turned on in the compiler).
Its now about 3x faster than C, thanks to some use of clever layered data structures. I could implement those optimizations in C, but I find rust easier to work with.
C has advantages, but performance is a bad reason to choose C over rust. In my experience, the runtime bounds checks it adds are remarkably cheap from a performance perspective. And its more than offset by the extra optimizations the rust compiler can do thanks to the extra knowledge the compiler has about your program. If my experience is anything to go by, naively porting C programs to rust would result in faster code a lot of the time.
And I find it easier to optimize rust code compared to C code, thanks to generics and the (excellent) crates ecosystem. If I was optimizing for runtime speed, I'd pick rust over C every time.
Here, you can of course make a more safe language without runtime penalty just by supporting richer build-time/static checks, but the modest and meaningful gains you make within that constraint will never be enough to displace C.
You need to be providing something meaningfully more in areas where C hasn't already squeezed out most gains. The OP tastefully avoided making this article directly about C3, but if you go and look at the summary of features, you can see how this philosophy connects with what they're working to build.
If you could pay in performance a little bit, but have a clean, portable, beautiful debugger experience, nice libraries like 'Java' with a 'stable ABI' ... nobody would use C. We'd all use 'that new thing'. And we would just buy slightly faster hardware for the IoT whatever.
We use C++ smart pointers all over the place, and they come with a 'cost'. We mostly 'happily pay the price' because it's worth it most scenarios.
Engineers obsession with performance is a bit of a curse. Rarely do we really need that much. Kernel code, sure, IoT and remotely controlled toy cars, mostly not.
The sad part is that the mainstream alternatives that I have on the radar are _even slower_ to build.
And usage of the preprocessor in APIs is allowing for good things, at least for a compiled systems language like C: Macros allow to get rid of boilerplate on the syntax level and if-defs allow for compatibility. Both points' significance is reduced a long way in other languages, because they have stronger facilities for abstraction, BUT this abstraction comes at a non-significant price and cannot replace all significant uses of the preprocessor.
So I'm still stuck with C. The solution is designing header files carefully, resulting in build times that are lightning fast, at least in relation to most other mainstream languages. And there is always the option to go for "unity" builds.
As to improving modularization, in order to fix compilation speed issues I was trying out the "program as a single compilation unit" approach advocated by handmade people, and I found that I had to spent a good amount of time in moving code between modules, and their subsequent headers. So annoying... Perhaps it wouldn't be so infuriating if I didn't spend the past 15 years coding in languages where this is a problem solved automatically and invisibly by the compiler.
Suppose you have bounds checks on array accesses, but your program is 100% correct and the panic case is never hit. Doesn't the branch predictor essentially make the bounds check free? Or very low cost at least?
That said, a lot of pedestrian code that isn't running particularly hot would probably be better off including runtime checks by default.
EDIT: What language uses base-60??
You won't be able to use the standard library, but it's doable.
Let's go in a fantasy world where we have a B+ language which should have been C: remove typedef/_generic/typeof/restrict/enum/etc, well all those horrible things. Only one loop statement, loop {}, no switch ofc. Only sized/signed core types with properly sized/signed literals: ub/sb or u8/s8 with integer literals like 123ub/123sb, sw/sd..., udw/sdw... , uqw/sqw..., fdw/1.23fdw (f32), fqw/1.23fqw (f64) (for some hardware ymm/xmm/zmm with fancy literals, sorry I am not aware of the fine details of the C/CPP lexer). Ofc, no integer promotion and no implicit cast (void* would still not require any cast). Compile-time and runtime cast (not like with that horrible c++ syntax), same thing for consts (even though nowadays it is the the compiler which detects real compile-time constants), yes you may have to "static const" your literals. Oh, and for the C preprocessor, do fix that variadic-args function-like macro for good (I wonder if gcc the way is not better than c++ ISO way).
Without all that, it should be "reasonable" for a small team of average-skilled or an individual to write a naive compiler until they don't forget they can hit a goto at any line. And they are those who say "but feature A is cheap to implement"... 1 million cheap features later... well, you get the picture.
The really hard part for ISO was to keep C actually "cheap" to implement, this is where they are failing hard.
As for the gcc extension based C dialect for kernel developement, no salvation here, C is really too alien (or even B+). Namely the little ISA abstraction is not "enough", so either the kernel goes full "slow" with plain C and assembly (_not_ inline assembly ofc), or full assembly on all of its fast-paths which would require proper binary defined specs (I am currently researching how bad this could be).
I do believe the open source communities have the strength to maintain parallel assembly _significant_ code bases (which do the same thing), big monolithic corpos... not so sure...
> [...] Why? Because the actual programming is not the main time sink. In a business, what takes time is to actually figure out what the task really is. So something like a 10% or 20% "productivity boost" won't even register.
This reminds me of Amdahl's Law [1], about how a performance optimization (parallelism) has small returns because the performance improvement only affects a small portion of the overall process.
This annoys me so much in Java debates. The argument goes something like "It doesn't matter that Java is verbose and requires hundreds of files because the IDE generates them for you". And this is true... when you write the code. But the real friction is when you must read or change the code in response to new requirements, which is exactly what we as engineers spend the bulk of our time doing.
With this knowledge I choose to align myself with languages and platforms that respect C and complement it (Lua, Objective-C, etc) instead of languages and platforms that try to supplant it (c++, java, swift, rust, etc)
Also, you got any recommendations for a c library for server apps?
1. In other words, the size of a "hello world" program matters, as does the storage space and time I need for the compiler toolchain and libraries.
What language should I use. I am not interested in writing large, complex programs.
You can use C, but with better syntax.
https://cboard.cprogramming.com/c-programming/181160-hi-i-ha...
I'm looking for contributors. :)
To give a concrete example, I was able to write production-ready code with 2 weeks of Rust experience and nobody to provide support for questions (beyond reading StackOverflow), and that code was more reliable and less buggy then the Python/JavaScript code our company was otherwise writing, even though we were collectively much more experienced in those stacks. I doubt we'd have gotten that with C, even though we had a bunch of developers who were experienced with C.
In larger programs on full-fat operating systems, programs tend to be much larger (esp. if you include libraries - dealing with libraries being one of the most complex things in C), and you have to deal with sophisticated allocation patterns, and complex types (webs of pointers), abstractions and business logic which is where C basically leaves you on your own and provides very little in terms of structure or guard rails.
Some problems require solutions which are unable to be solved in C in a safe way.
I posted this less than 24 hours ago.
This might be what you want, and there's no overhead at all.
It might actually speed up your code. 15x faster regex
I just made this. I'm looking for contributors :)
The vast, vast majority of programmers aren’t doing their computing by writing C anymore. It’s been the better part of 20 years since you could plausibly call it the Lingua Franca of computing.