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0 pointssirwhinesalot4d ago0 comments

I have in the past made fun of the Linux kernel devs, supposedly some of the best C developers in the world, for not knowing how to make stringbuffer and stringview types, but to be fair to them we didn't have the consensus we have today on the topic.

You know who did have the right idea though? Dennis Ritchie, who proposed a fat pointer type for C all the way back in 1990. Would have made for a perfect addition to C99. Imagine how different the world might have been had the committee added that in.

We had a second chance with the release of the "C's greatest mistake" blog article from Walter Bright in 2007, essentially pushing for the same idea as Ritchie (slices/stringviews) but explained with much clearer language.

Alas, didn't make it to C11.

We're now in C23, still nothing. But we did get _Generic and VLAs! Party hard.

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10 comments · 6 top-level

flohofwoe4d ago· 2 in thread

> But we did get _Generic and VLAs! Party hard.

VLA has been demoted to an optional feature in C11 (good).

IMHO the current main problem is that the C stdlib is stuck in the K&R era and the stdlib APIs haven't even been updated to the language features added in C99 (e.g. make use of struct args and return values). A range struct (ptr/size pair) in the stdlib and new or updated string functions to use such ranges would already go a long way.

VorpalWay4d ago

> IMHO the current main problem is that the C stdlib is stuck in the K&R era and the stdlib APIs haven't even been updated to the language features added in C99 (e.g. make use of struct args and return values).

C++ has the same issue (only with more chaos and bloat). They add some new good idea (like optional) but don't update the rest of the standard library to make use of it. And they can't really, without breaking backwards compatibility.

I think looking at the edition system in Rust could be useful for C and C++ to start to solve this. Something like "If this source file has this pragma in it, compile that code with a new edition". It would have to be granular, per expression really, to handle macros (which is how it works in Rust too). What would it change in C/C++? Name resolution, you could get a different set of resolvable overloads, depending on which edition is active in the caller context. Not unlike an enable_if.

The same would work in C: depending on the caller edition, expose function signatures.

steveklabnik4d ago

Someone tried to propose this in C++ a few years ago, but it never made it in. https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p18...

anal_reactor4d ago· 2 in thread

> but to be fair to them we didn't have the consensus we have today on the topic.

This is my pet peeve of teamwork. We can choose solutions A, B or C. Each has upsides and downsides. We debate for two weeks, then we choose nothing.

david-gpu4d ago

Isn't that due to a lack of leadership, rather than a problem with teamwork itself? Somebody has to be ultimately in charge and willing to put a stop to endless debate.

gbin4d ago

It is more like a "design by committee" issue to me. The decisional structure needs to be built for some opinionated decision. When you have a committee there is not one clear thing they are solving for as everyone has an agenda to tug the language towards their own interests. The result of that can certainly be inaction because it is easier to say no than yes.

ethbr14d ago

> "C's greatest mistake" blog article from Walter Bright in 2007

https://digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html

And because it came up in my search and the bikeshedding discussion made me chuckle, reddit on same: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/90uq7c/cs_bi...

Am curious about this esoterica, if anyone can confirm/deny:

>> Speaking of [C] arrays decaying into pointers, does anyone know why this behaviour was designed in the first place?

>> It was so that B code could be compiled as C with minimal changes. The designer felt that this would encourage people to switch from B to C. In B an array declaration actually defined a pointer and an array, with the pointer initialized to point to the array's first element.

fulafel4d ago

Link to Ritchie's proposal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114358/https://www.bell-...

pjmlp4d ago

That only goes to show where WG14 priorities are.

HackerThemAll3d ago

I have used the DJB's stralloc library a lot. Not a single vulnerability, binary string safe. Good enough for 99% of applications.

https://cr.yp.to/lib/stralloc.html

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