• key@lemmy.keychat.orgEnglish
    2 years

    C is modern hippy-dippy shit, let’s go back to the only good compiled language: FORTRAN

          • bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml
            2 years

            You as a programmer must control what you are doing. Right?

            You telling me you’ve never made a programming error? Your code always compiles and passes all tests right?

          • Lmaydev@programming.devdeleted by creator
            2 years

            Do you really not know what memory safety is? How long have you been programming?

            It’s rust’s borrow checker or garbage collectors or smart pointers.

            That’s not true at all. But if it was what stops the LLMs writing c?

              • Lmaydev@programming.devdeleted by creator
                2 years

                I love c# personally. Gives you flexibility to write high level code when performance isn’t an issue or jump all the way down to raw pointers and native compilation when it does.

                Interestingly the new tiered jit can achieve better performance than a traditional compiler as it has runtime information to further optimise code.

                C in my experience becomes a nightmare as code bases grow.

  • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
    2 years

    Why stop at programming languages? Let’s scrap everything invented in the last 50 years!

    • bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml
      2 years

      Does that mean we can go back to when houses were cheap? I’m willing to make this sacrifice.

  • porgamrer@programming.dev
    2 years

    If I went back to the early days of C, it would be because John Connor sent me there in a time machine to destroy the first compiler before it could become self-hosting

  • amio@kbin.social
    2 years

    Why do computers become more and more powerful, but programs continue to lag?

    Because instead of taking advantage of hardware to push boundaries in what we can accomplish, it’s exploited so you can turn everything into its own instance of Chromium, with all the bloat and overhead that entails, for the world’s simplest application. Even on mobile, where power consumption is allegedly important.

    The industry spends so much time reinventing wheels and shoehorning things into each other, instead of doing anything… useful. Can’t have a normal web page anymore because waaaah page loads, gotta be SPA, then you gotta reinvent all the stuff that you threw out to make an SPA - probably in the form of several dozen libraries, all of which also keep getting reinvented every other week. What’s that, the SPA is now a 4GB download and seven orders of magnitude slower than the page loads it was supposedly meant to avoid? Lol who cares. Put some more layers of transpiled javascript in there anyway. Keeping up with the NPM dependencies alone is now 40% of the manpower in the corporation? Don’t worry, it’s modular or some shit.

    It’s not even about the money, none of this helps generate actual value - in theory, being able to just target web makes sense, but not if relentlessly overcomplicated at every turn anyway. If the money/management people could tear themselves away from being phished for five minutes, and actually understood how much time and effort is being wasted on building mostly redundant card houses of mostly unnecessary tech, they’d have a stroke.

    • Lmaydev@programming.devdeleted by creator
      2 years

      It really does help generate money.

      Newer languages are often more productive. Especially in large team environments where you can’t be expected to know the entire codebase.

      Reducing mental load on the developer helps a lot. There’s no way you can say c is simpler than higher level languages.

      And in many cases the performance bump you get is lost to IO, database and http calls.

      In fact if you want to you can write everything with pointers in c# and due to things like tiered jit compilation it can outperform c. You can even compile straight to native code now.

      But the fact is people don’t do that because in 90+% of cases the extra effort isn’t beneficial.

      Plus most consumers don’t give a shit about resource use tbh.

      • amio@kbin.social
        2 years

        Reducing mental load on the developer helps a lot. There’s no way you can say c is simpler than higher level languages.

        Sure, and… that’s why I didn’t say that, I guess? I live firmly in VM/script land - C# when I can, actually. Reducing developer load is fine by me and I don’t have a particular obsession with optimizing for performance - most things I do are not that exciting.

        My point is that there’s a difference between layers of abstraction that serve an actual purpose (loops, classes, garbage collection), and weird stuff that grows out of “innovation” that maybe wasn’t all that good an idea, but was tacked on something else for novelty or cargo cult reasons, or the wrong kind of laziness. The idea of being able to only target web is fine. The idea of occasionally shipping a browser with a particular app could be merited. I’m just saying maybe not half of every app needed to be bundled with a whole chromium installation.

  • MaoZedongers@lemmy.today
    2 years

    We have better tools than C today, in C’s own domain.

    So many parts of C are poorly designed or outdated and we’re stuck with them because of backwards compatibility.

    Look how long it took to deptecate “gets”, a function that is pretty much impossible to use safely.

    My choice pick is Nim but Zig and Odin are contenders too.

    Plus rust as well.

  • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
    2 years

    One problem with this is that C is in no way the “roots” of programming; it’s older than most of the languages we use today, but Fortran, Lisp, and Cobol are all older and are also still in use. (And of course there are other languages that predate C but have mostly fallen out of use, such as Pascal.) It feels “low-level” because it closely reflects the hardware for which it was originally designed, the PDP-7 and later the PDP-11. But in fact it hasn’t truly been “low-level” for a long time: I highly recommend the ACM article “C Is Not a Low-level Language; Your computer is not a fast PDP-11.”

  • Tony Bark@pawb.socialEnglish
    2 years

    Most (popular) programs are lagging because they’re all bundling an entire web browser to get around the cross-platform hurdle. Good in theory, bad in practice. However, even infamous programming languages like Java are now as fast as C thanks to advances in hardware and software, such multiple cores and asynchronous tasks.

    • MaoZedongers@lemmy.today
      2 years

      As fast as C is likely an overstatement, few languages can claim that, but the difference can be negligible or faster in certain optimized usecases.