this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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C Programming Language

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Welcome to the C community!

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
... When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
... The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

Β© Dennis Ritchie

🌐 https://en.cppreference.com/w/c

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Personally, I have nothing against the emergence of new programming languages. This is cool:

  • the industry does not stand still
  • competition allows existing languages to develop and borrow features from new ones
  • developers have the opportunity to learn new things while avoiding burnout
  • there is a choice for beginners
  • there is a choice for specific tasks

But why do most people dislike the C language so much? But it remains the fastest among high-level languages. Who benefits from C being suppressed and attempts being made to replace him? I think there is only one answer - companies. Not developers. Developers are already reproducing the opinion imposed on them by the market. Under the influence of hype and the opinions of others, they form the idea that C is a useless language. And most importantly, oh my god, he's unsafe. Memory usage. But you as a programmer are (and must be) responsible for the code you write, not a language. And the one way not to do bugs - not doing them.

Personally, I also like the Nim language. Its performance is comparable to C, but its syntax and elegance are more modern.

And in general, I’m not against new languages, it’s a matter of taste. But when you learn a language, write in it for a while, and then realize that you are burning out 10 times faster than before, you realize the cost of memory safety.

This is that cost:

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Correction: str is not really stack-allocated, it rather is a fat pointer (i.e. pointer + length) to a string somewhere (on the heap or in the binary).

Edith: replaced heap with stack

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I never said str is heap-allocated. I'm presuming you meant stack when you said heap (or you meant String when you said str)?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You're right, I meant stack.
str is not like an u8 array, but a pointer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That's fair. Because I explicitly mentioned &'static str later on, my explanation of &str implicitly assumes that it's a non-static lifetime str, so it isn't stored in the executable, which would only leave the stack. I didn't want to get into lifetimes in what's supposed to be a high-level description of types for non-Rust programmers, though. I mentioned 'stack' and 'heap' explicitly here because people understand that they mean 'fast' and 'slow', respectively. Otherwise the first question out of people's mouths is 'why have a non-growable string type at all??'.