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Comment by fmo91 | Hacker News Reader

It's not very clear to me why the author has chosen C in the first place. I appreciate the effort of sharing the experience with us, anyway.

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I didn't want to state why C and not "X" because the comments would have devolved into an all out language war.

Fair enough. But I am also curious if you'd like to share your rationale.

As someone who works on C compilers, I find the obession with C language insane.

For any greenfield project, pick up C++ in lieu of C if you want a C language.

There is no runtime penalty for using C++ if you stick to plain structs and don't use virtual functions, but you get better static type safety, lvalue references, namespaces, etc. even if you don't use the OO features.

Even for virtual functions, the overhead is minimal that it is just noise.

C compilers themselves are written in C++ for the last 15 years. Oh, the irony!

I generally like "C-style C++", but I find it difficult to draw the line between C and C++. It's too easy to keep reaching into C++ for "just one more thing."

That may be a me problem.

T> here is no runtime penalty for using C++

Large portions of the standard lib depend on heap allocations. C is a much safer target for environments with limited resources.

So use the C standard library instead of the C++ one. You still get RAII / constructors/destructors and runtime polymorphism, along with stronger compile-time type safety.

I frequently do that myself on simple C++ programs just for compile time reasons alone, where I'll use stdio.h instead of std::iostream or std::format.

Designated initializers are gimped in C++;

C++ 20 added designated initializers, but the fields have to be specified in declaration order.

It partially added them. You can't use them out of order or skip members nor can you use the array initializers.

It's what we did at amzn in 1994 ...

Wasn't amazon running on tandem back then?

In 1994, amzn ran on a single solaris workstation. Same at the beginning of 1995. I can't comment after that.

caveat: Amazon was just a simple online bookstore at the time. There was little relation to what amazon is now (no AWS for example) except it was already selling and shipping stuff and keeping an inventory like any other online store.

actually, in 1994/95, there was (almost) no inventory.

we invented a system we called "almost in time", the basic principle of which was "no we don't have that in stock but we can get it for you really fast". this is why we had to write our own system, because all the existing inventory mgmt systems (at least at that time) assumed that you would have at least some stuff in stock.

That's the method of modern thieves. They advertize your stuff and only stole them when they find a potential buyer.

I've had friends finding photos of their own bicycle locked in the street advertized in second hand platforms.

Because in practice it’s really hard to not succumb to C++ feature creep. You start with good intentions and limit yourself to namespaces and structs, but then the “this will benefit from a vector, or this from a map” appears, then you realize you’d like a templated use case, and a single raw pointer or resource handle from a call to something like fopen() suddenly is not releasing its resource on a linked list pop and now you’re writing move semantics on top of copy semantics because a destructor declaration silently enforces copies on a std::move without move semantics. You reach for a unique pointer and, and all of a sudden, you have most of modern C++ without a single virtual call.

So people obsess over C because you’re hard limited by the upper feature bound. And that’s not so bad because C gets feature updates too - microscopic but effective feature updates; see C29 for the poor man’s RAII: defer

C3 lang gives you defer + a lot of significant ergonomic improvements right now: https://c3-lang.org

and what it does take away? most "better C" languages basically looks like C++ (except zig, maybe). Nobody write something real in them, so nobody knows about their pitfalls.

What do you mean by that?

n=1 but I've probably written (sic - a lot of AI) over a million lines of it this year. I like it precisely because it is nothing like C++, it's really just a better C, and the compiler / tooling is almost as good as Go.

C3 is very good

> fn int foo(){

Eh? What's the point of a `fn` keyword if I can't `grep -r "fn foo"`?

gcc also gives you defer nowadays, called cleanup

Indeed, my experience is that just sticking to C leads to better software. I found it relieving and not limiting.

There is a huge mental overhead penalty...

For any greenfield project, pick up Rust instead of C++. Why? Ask any AI and it will pick Rust. Since AI is writing the code now and it likes Rust, because the pre-AI internet in its most trustworthy training dataset liked Rust. Therefore all code will eventually be Rust.

> For any greenfield project, pick up C++ in lieu of C if you want a C language.

Depends on the metric.

1. If the metric is "How many features can I have", then, sure, C++ wins - it has everything.

2. If the metric is "how few footguns are there", then C++ loses by a mile - there's too many ways that the different features from #1 above can interact with each other to make it viable to keep track of all the footguns when writing code.

You may not value having fewer footguns and/or lower cognitive burden, but many do.

Yesterday or so there was a post about using Zig. When I read it I thought that using C would work equally well.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting that both of these[0] were on the front page.

[0] - the other one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50051573

The underlying libraries you use tend to be in C anyway, so it simplifies things to just use them with their native interface, and not having to add another language runtime and its idiosyncrasies.

Probably because he knows it well and he rely on pledge and unveil capabilities of openbsd and it is well documented on how to use those in C.

You can do that in other languages but you need to use aditionnal dependencies (modules or bindings).

I can never figure out why everything isn't in C. :|

Is it because you segfault before reaching the answer?

A segfault IS the memory protection taking in effect.

From all the programs I use, the ones written in C are the most reliable (such as vim, bash, coreutils, terminals, X11¹, ... also larger software such as gimp, blender). Over decades I literally can't experience a single crash!

¹ The exception is the Nouveau driver, but without it X was also perfectly stable for me.

I'm old enough to remember when the OKCupid guys wrote their own webserver in C++!

I took the concept of "slots" in requests, from it: https://github.com/okws/okws

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