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0 pointsspriggan310y ago0 comments

> So perhaps I've made it clearer as to why C is less popular now

C is "not popular" (that's relative) because C is verbose, practical C is ugly and just dangerous if not in expert hands. I'm not a fan of Go but Go doesn't have C memory management problems. The complexity of C development is also in the tooling, Cmake, make, autotools , autogen and co ... imagine you're a beginer today , you need to write a server . It's like 4 lines in Go then you just type Go build.

With C you'd have to install the proper library, then choose a build tool, then learn another language like make , then learn m4 macros ; then learn to do proper memory management , ... it takes way more than a day to get started, it takes months ... C lacks of a lot of modern features such as namespaces, simple string support, ... C isn't going away, Linux kernel is written in C so it will always be a dependency but explaining why C is the last choice when developing applications is pretty easy.

Try writing a JSON api in pure C backed by a NoSQL db , then try the same with Go or Rust. You might be an C expert so ask someone that is a noob in software development to do the same, from scratch and watch the amount of time it takes to do so. Now give him Go to write the exact same thing ...

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jallmann10y ago· 2 in thread

While the problem space where C would be appropriate has been shrinking, this rant is nonsense.

> With C you'd have to install the proper library, then choose a build tool, then learn another language like make , then learn m4 macros ; then learn to do proper memory management

What library? The libc that is on every OS? Build tools and Makefiles aren't exclusive to C; any non-trivial project is going to have tooling, no matter the language [1]. Also, if you don't understand memory management, then why do you think starting a new project in C would be appropriate...?

> Try writing a JSON api in pure C backed by a NoSQL db

That's rather under-specified (what kind of JSON API?), but there are very few cases where you would actually want to write such an API in C, maybe unless you're actually working on the DB bindings themselves, and assuming the DB is in C/C++. Even then, it's arguable whether JSON is the ideal serialization. Choose the right tool for the job.

[1] I'd argue that Makefiles and M4 are still very useful on their own and it'd behoove developers of all kinds to learn them anyway... maybe we'd have less (poorly done) reinvention with idiosyncratic, flavor-of-the-day build systems.

spriggan3OP10y ago

> The hype train

The OP specifically talked about the "hype train". There is no hype train at all. The new languages like Go and co are the answer to problems that exist with using C as a language for writing servers.

> That's rather under-specified (what kind of JSON API?), but there are very few cases where you would actually want to write such an API in C

Again the OP said all these new language were just hip. I answered than no, they are not, because of the reason you just exposed. We agree, you just didn't understand the point of my message and what I was responding to.

Dismissing Go and co as "hype" and then talking about the awesomeness of C is certainly non sense.

jallmann10y ago

The issue is that your criticisms of C range from superficial, to incorrect, to straw men.

> Dismissing Go and co as "hype"

I didn't read OP as dismissing Go &c, just an acknowledgement that they are getting a lot of attention, along with their tooling.

OP didn't say what he was using C/C++ for either, so it's weak to make a comparison where none was implied eg, JSON API. That entire post was a very roundabout way to quibble about the use of the word "hype" by going on an otherwise unprovoked diatribe against C.

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