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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

I love to see slim alternatives to bigger, older tools (acknowledging that both versions have their place in the world).

However, I have to ask: why C? Apparently the author is very comfortable using it, and I'm sure using C has enabled them to make a very efficient implementation with a small binary size.

But this program is just slinging around strings, right? Is manual memory management actually important, or even desirable?

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ANSI-C (and to a lesser extent C99) is pretty much the only language which you can compile anywhere, forever. For this project portability is the #1 requirement.

If he used, say Rust, then the target system needs a rust compiler, and furthermore, the language is not even close to being as standardized a C is at the moment, i.e. who knows if in the future you will still be able to compile your program that you write on 2023's dialect?

Lua is pretty small, portable, and easy to build; you can ship the lua source code with a "lua-pkg-config" so you don't need to install anything else. Lua is not my favourite language, but for something like this it might be a nice fit.

I think C is also fine though.

Yes, the official Lua implementation is written in a very widely supported subset of C, so is probably one of the most portable languages along with C. Lua might well be a bit more concise for a task like this string processing, but in such as case it's just syntactic sugar really. The C is uncomplicated and efficient.

Everyone and their dog can compile C, and the initial purpose of this project was to get something working on Windows. As you say, this is a relatively uncomplicated program, and there's certainly no need for higher-level features.

Is the only time you choose C when you need manual memory management? I suspect that had nothing to do with their decision.

Chris mentions explicitly that he used a byte buffer plus length pair backed by an arena allocator for the strings in the application.

He implemented this alternative explicitly to be included on his own C Windows development environment, w64devkit.

Why anything else? It is a very small tool that is needed to bootstrap a build, C is the lowest common denominator.

Similarly, few things infuriate me more than the installation of some random Python package having to pull an entire Rust toolchain with it.

Rust would have been a better option. But probably it's just because the author is more familiar with C. Maybe also because the author wants it to be more cross platform.

I'm a big Rust fan in the sense that it's the language I go to nowadays to write anything serious. But it's quite a lot in terms of bootstrapping.

Whereas this? Just the very basics, fully portable, pretty much any C compiler has you covered.

Because of bootstrapping

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