Proposal for a community C website and a refrence compiler

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10 points·z3phyr··5 comments

>please stop the fucking whining.

Nice to see that comp.lang.c is still as toxic as it ever was.

I don't see people talking much about C having a 'culture problem' like they do with Lisp but I'm not sure why. Before the existence of things like stackoverflow asking for help with C was always just as much of a baptism of fire as asking for help with Common Lisp.

Perhaps because the average developer is more likely to be a newbie that seeks help when using CL?

I agree with the first point. ( an ISO website like isocpp.org )

But strongly oppose the second. Who is gonna develop and maintain such a fruitless project. You are not gonna be able optimize it as much as GCC. No one will use.

Here is a rant about C:

Many projects refuse code that contains single line comments // . This should give a nice hint how C language is treated. On the other hand i have been writing C++11 exlusively since 2012. C doesn't like change. Not a community a newcomer would like to be in.

> You are not gonna be able optimize it as much as GCC. No one will use.

If LLVM were used as a backend for a C11 compiler then optimizations would be for free. Since C is has such a small surface area, and since LLVM is very much designed for C-like languages, it would be quite easy (e.g. 1 person-year) to implement a production quality C11 front-end for LLVM.

But why would you, given that LLVM is written in C++ and that clang.llvm.org exists?

I get the impression this article wants a C compiler written in plain C for reasons of ideology. I don't think writing a compiler in C on top of a huge project written in C++ is compatible with that ideology.

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