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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I will.

C is everywhere and is not going away (it's #2 on TIOBE and on the rise again). Now that fewer people are learning it, I get more juicy contracts.

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I feel like there’s actually a growing subculture of C programmers of late, seemingly spawned by Casey Muratori’s Handmade Hero series, Zed Shaw’s “Learn C The Hard” way and other more recent popularizations of C and low level programming ideas. There’s a whole “Handmade” software scene growing up, seemingly as a reaction against the bloat and over engineering of more recent software trends like Electron and web apps. Just the other day I stumbled across a vibrant Discord group focused on a fairly new but surprisingly feature complete game engine called Gunslinger, written entirely in C99. I’ve been working on my own C-based game engine for awhile too after having been exposed to the ideas of Handmade Hero, as well as from the influence of a good friend who has been writing games in C for many years. He’s now working on an application called Pixel CNC for generating 3D tool paths from 2D images.

> seemingly spawned by Casey Muratori’s Handmade Hero series, Zed Shaw’s “Learn C The Hard” way

It's kind of unfortunately, really, because both authors have very skewed viewpoints of C that are arguably quite incorrect.

also arguably quite correct

Out of curiosity: why do you consider Casey's viewpoint incorrect?

Casey doesn't really understand how optimizing compilers work, so he likes to talk about how they keep breaking his code and that they should just run the optimizations that won't do that.

What viewpoints are those, for those of us unfamiliar?

Zed Shaw doesn't really like C because it lets you shoot yourself in the foot. This is an OK opinion to have, but then he goes and writes books about C that basically talk about how the language is bad (ok, I guess?) but the then claims he has solutions to these problems, without understanding that the problems he has with C are not solvable within the language (for example, when handed an arbitrary pointer, there is no way to tell whether it is valid).

Casey Muratori is fundamentally at odds with how undefined behavior works in C and has opinions™ on how to fix the language to make things work the way he wants them to, when in reality he just probably wants another language.

C++ requires to devote your life to it but you can learn C and spend a year using it and suddenly you have a dangerous but powerful tool in your toolbox forever.

It's not like C++ is always the only alternative, see e.g. Rust which is way simpler

I agree that Rust is simpler than C++ (in some ways), but I’d say it is far more complex than C.

That depends on how you define complexity. It is far easier to write a working program without memory leaks, various types of vulnerabilities, and undefined behavior in Rust than it is in C.

It depends on what level of security you need. If you're writing a 3D game engine, a minor memory leak probably isn't worth the extra time required to write it in Rust. Even if you're writing a kernel, fuzzing and formal verification can get you 99.999 of the way to the guarantees of Rust.

I feel like writing Rust is a whole lot faster and less error-prone than writing something in C. But even assuming that it's slower, it's definitely much faster than writing C and doing formal verification. Naturally formal verification can help with other properties besides memory safety, and as far as I am aware Rust is still lacking a formal semantics so when you go all-in on formal methods C can reach a provable level of quality that Rust currently cannot. But very few people develop software that way.

C is probably still popular, but TIOBE is less accurate than a horoscope.

TIOBE index shows C has lost 62% of its users in 2016-2018, then almost tripled in popularity next year, and then again lost almost half of its users.

Do you think such swing of popularity is possible for such an established slow-moving language? I don't think so — it just shows how far TIOBE can diverge from reality, and that the error bars on the index should be +/- 50%. A few % blip means nothing. TIOBE is measuring rollouts of new Google search algorithms, not language popularity.

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