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Comment by spacelizard | Hacker News Reader

Brings back fond memories of the first time I learned C, when I really had to dig into what the difference was between storage durations (auto/stack, dynamic/heap, static, thread local). It makes it increasingly important to think about when an object is going to be stored, and for how long. To me this is still a really useful concept that most high-level languages seem to have all disregarded in favor of extremely eager GC or refcounting, with the exception of Rust.

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C has a really simple model with regard to storage durations, but the usage/omission of the respective keywords (static, extern, auto) is what makes it hard for beginners, IMO.

`static` means different things at file scope and at block scope, `extern` is redundant most of the time (except when linking to an object from another unit), `auto` is 100% redundant and is a leftover from the days when `int` was implied for every declaration.

    most high-level languages seem to have all disregarded in
    favor of extremely eager GC or refcounting, with the 
    exception of Rust.

Because Rust does a good job of hiding the fact it isn't a high level language.

Sure you have ML type checking, pointer safety rules, multiple returns. But if you can see past the syntax sugar you realize it is just C (with guardrails).

High level abstraction or syntax sugar?

Terrorist or freedom fighter?

the twist with gc or refcounting is that you actually still need to think about memory management.. in many ways, unfortunately, it becomes harder to control. An advantage of user managed memory is that you always need to think about it, with every line you write so if there is an issue, it will become apparent rather quickly. Buffer overruns, however, are never much fun.. and largely avoided with auto memory management so it's clearly useful in most cases. At least with most of boring software that I write.

>Brings back fond memories of the first time I learned C, when I really had to dig into what the difference was between storage durations (auto/stack, dynamic/heap, static, thread local)

If those are your fond memories, I'd hate to hear your traumatic ones. :P

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