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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Not really pure C, plenty of #include that aren't part of ISO C standard.

Pure UNIX/POSIX C, more likely.

"Pure C" doesn't really mean anything, but if it did mean something it would mean "only C", not "only standard C", wouldn't it?

The programming language C is defined by ISO C, this isn't 1970's any longer.

Thus pure C, by definition is what the said standard since 1989 says what the programming language and standard library is supposed to be.

This is objectively untrue, and everyone knows it. A huge amount of C code in the real world goes beyond ISO C. Saying that "C" consists only of what is in the ISO standard is ideological flamewar.

The world is full of impure C.

Objectively we have a clickbait title.

Yes, and much of what is in the later versions of the C standard haven't been adopted widely by C programmers.

Using system and vendor libraries is part of the C language. We're not talking about language extensions here, we're talking about #include <unistd.h>.

There is a reason why they are called system and vendor libraries, and not standard library.

They are third party libraries, outside the language reference.

they aren't part of whatever standard yet they are still pure C. Pure C is not a well defined term but it refers to the fact that only the C language was used for the project. Which C version and whether other libs have been used is not part of the term.

Pure C means the programming language C, defined by an international standard called ISO C, since 1989.

I think that's "Standard C"?

Pure C surely just means you're only using C. As in, no C++ or Objective C or whatnot. Nothing wrong with calling out to POSIX functions, at least nothing not already obvious.

Pure C means using the programming language C, alongside its standard library, without any kind of extras.

This "pure c" won't compile with any random C compiler, unless it happens to be a C compiler in a POSIX environment.

Using an API in a language says nothing definite about how that API is implemented. The API could well be implemented in what you call "pure C".

So that term isn't very meaningful in the way you claim it is, and there is no need for you to be policing it. If it was about "dependency free" could maybe agree more.

The term is often used to indicate that the source code of the project itself does't make significant use of other languages like C++, and to allude to a sense of simplicity (which is often subjective).

A point of view I disagree with, there is no point using pure C in the title, when it clearly isn't.

This is HN, we police articles after all.

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