Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

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> I like using C, but I get frustrated every time I hit a wall trying to build features from other languages.

Well there's your problem. Instead of thinking about your problem and devising a C solution, you resort to pounding the square peg into the round hole. Your problem isn't C, it's your proficiency at it. What's worse, instead of correcting said ignorance your solution is to produce more code using a new language. This only adds to the gross pile of trash that is every language/framework that tries to solve programmer ignorance and laziness with what amounts to wishful thinking. This is why software really sucks nowadays. Everyone wants results without reading the manual or putting in real effort. They want languages with built in hand holding and magic inference. That's not how any of this works.

I get it, programming and C sucks because it's so damn tedious. I suck at C too. But I actively study books and similar problems people already solved using the language. Programming is very hard. The best programmers I know are also very good with math and puzzles (e.g. Ken Thompson was a chess geek). They're puzzle solvers. They don't cheat and try to smash or duck tape the pieces together. They thrive on studying strategy meaning reading books, papers, and other people's code. Learn how to solve the puzzles strategically instead of fighting them.

I shouldn't bite... sigh.

When writing interrupt service routines for serial communications on an obscure architecture with multiple heaps (one 16 bit addressable and one 32 bit addressable), I could have written 2000 lines of assembly. Instead, I used a system of assembly macros and wrote about 300 lines of that.

When writing firmware in a C which lacked decent coroutines, I could have just made a giant while loop and put all of my logic in it. Instead, I wrote a quick implementation of coroutines, a scheduler, and a basic async/await implementation using the C preprocessor. This also saved thousands of lines of boilerplate code.

The fact that C has no good method of implementing a generic hashmap has nothing to do with my proficiency in the language. My proficiency in C also has nothing to do with my love of sweet, glorious type inference, or my deep felt appreciation for the conveniences modern IDEs and languages provide. Writing software has never been better!

Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but what I'm hearing is: "You don't need to use Vim to get more done, you just need to get better at typing. Not that I know anything about how fast you type." Or... you know, I could just use Vim.

Sounds like you rolled your own RTOS. Dang. Very nice!

Psh! I wish!

Implementing cooroutines in C is pretty old hat: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html

If you just put together a linked list of structs which represent the routines, the time they last slept, and what they're last waiting on, you can just iterate through it and you've got most of the functionality of async/await. I never bothered to implement separate stacks and register restoration, opting to just use global variables for state that needed to be saved between awaits. It would have been neat to do that, but I think it would have turned an afternoon spent saving time into a multiday project, and left me permanently paranoid about corrupting the stack or registers. Would have been fun though.

> I shouldn't bite... sigh.

That is not how your original post read to me. It sounded like you came from the dynamic/scripting language world and are trying to hammer those features into C. You sound quite proficient, I'm not trying to shit on you or anything. I'm tired, it's late, and no one cares but it sounds like you want something like an mbed that runs python or FreeRTOS? Why reinvent the wheel if someone already did this? Or is it simply that you're stuck using C on your "weird" platform? In that case, I'd say have a look at Nim, there's an embedded branch. It's a dynamic language that compiles to C89 so perhaps it's buildable on your platform. If it's a personal project then have fun.

> That's not how any of this works.

That's actually how _all_ of this works. If we required everyone to handle the complexity of everything, we wouldn't be able to make technological progress. Yes, there's the tension (there's always a tension) between having a deep understanding of an underlying technology, and therefore be able to use it better, and trying to get to a point where you can get away with not understanding. But it's undeniably considered a success story in technology if the technology gets to a point where people can use it to basically its full potential, without needing to understand it.

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