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[HELP] From Python OOP to C (vlemmy.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello there, fellow programmers! I am an Aeronautical Engineering student who is doing research on Multidisciplinary Optimization (MDO) since the beginning of this year.

All the code I've written so far is in Python, but I want to move it to C so I can learn more about low level programming and so I can have more control over what my code actually does (since it is an MDO code, it needs to be very optimized because every 0.5 seconds added to each iteration add 500 seconds over 1000 iterations (9 minutes!)). I am taking an online course on C from edX, but I still cannot understand how to actually substitute objects for C compliant code. The main problem is that my original code uses lots of objects, and I simply do not know how to eliminate objects from my code.

Can someone help me? Any help is welcomed.

[edit] Thanks for all your answers, I think I'm getting it now.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The main reason why one would want to use C is likely Foreign Function Interface (FFI), whatever code you write in C (apart from emitting assemblies) would likely be usable and extensible from any other programming languages so long that some of the conventions are followed. Rust and C++ could likely produce code just as fast as well optimized C code, but inaccessible or not readily accessible to other programming languages IE Name Mangling that are compiler implementation dependent, missing FFI access to STL and Traits and so forth.

FFI is pretty much the only reason why I am still writing in C in a very large project like GUI Toolkit to replace GTK and QT by using Vulkan. I would not recommend doing what I do when it come to implementing OOP manually in C to ensure that other programming language could extend my library. (I would write VTable manually and establish some of the OOP paradigms. C compiler does extremely well when optimizing out virtual dispatches to static dispatch.)

That's about it, as you said, it have a lot of hassles in C, so that why I am now working on Compiler Generator to create dialects on top of C similarly to MLIR so it would compile to readable C at the end of it as well as generating LSP server, FFI-JSON, and other things for it.