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Comment by uecker | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure what you mean by "weak" type system. C's type system is not weak IMHO and also differentiates between arrays and pointers:

   _Generic((typeof(x), int*: 1, int[]: 2)

\_Generic with type argument is a new feature, it is a bit less elegant without it:

   _Generic((typeof(x)*)0, typeof(int*)*: 1, typeof(int[])\*: 2)

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Any pointer converts to void* without warning. That's pretty weak.

This is the point of void*, one does not have to use it.

void* malloc(size_t size);

void free(void *ptr);

You use it a lot more than you think ;)

This is not a type safety issue though. For malloc the size has to agree. But in any case, you could wrap it into type-aware allocation demonstrating that this is not a limitation of the type system.

Perhaps not in the sense of weak vs strong, but rather in weak vs powerful. C type system isn't very powerful, if you compare it to languages from the scientific community (Python is an exception here imho). It is simple and probably good enough for what it was designed for (system programming), but it's not very good for scientific computing.

Why? I use it for scientific computing and find it very useful for exactly this purpose. But maybe you could be more precise and explain what exactly about the type system is not powerful enough.

Imho, a good type system for scientific computing will let you check that your computations are well formed. For instance, if one tries to apply a matrix to a vector of the wrong size, the type system should report it, or rather one should be able to express this sort of constraint using the type system to the same effect.

You are however correct, that doesn't mean that C cannot be useful for scientific computing, but I think that there are better alternatives. Although, one can write the core functionalities in C for speed and efficiency, and use another language as a driver.

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