Shlomi Fish has written a new essay titled "When C is the Best? (Tool for the Job)". Its theme is giving several reasons (besides high speed and low memory consumption) why some code should still be written in C.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Endiness isn't that big of a problem. You have what: two possibilities?
And why on earth would I want to use a language that lets the programmer deal with it instead of doing it itself? I can't think of any situation where as a programmer you would want to have the endianess differences exposed to your programs (not even in drivers). Just make everything be big endian in source code level and let the compiler figure out how put that in machine language.
Also, null terminated byte arrays are a library convention. It's not a language feature. If you want to manipulate unicode, use the proper library.
So, no portable strings in C? It's only portable when I rely on the standard C library, which uses null-terminated strings. When I have to rely on other libraries, I lose the (supposed) portability.
Member since:2005-08-08
Member since:2005-08-08
> So, no portable strings in C? It's only portable when I rely on the standard C library, which uses null-terminated strings. When I have to rely on other libraries, I lose the (supposed) portability.
If you change an API, I have to admit it is quite hard not to change the program...
Member since:2005-07-06
And why on earth would I want to use a language that lets the programmer deal with it instead of doing it itself? I can't think of any situation where as a programmer you would want to have the endianess differences exposed to your programs (not even in drivers).
You're going to want endianess differences exposed whenever you're dealing with a binary encoding. This includes various binary encodings for network protocols, video and audio encodings and even the bytecode which a JVM or .Net runtime needs to decode. If the compiler automatically enforced the endianess of the hardware (and some hardware allows you to change the endianess, what then?) how would you go about encoding or decoding such binary protocols?
Besides encoding and decoding binary protocols, when would a programmer even worry about endian issues anyways? I can't think of one time that I was actually bothered by that in normal application code.
Member since:
Member since:2005-06-29
Well, I believe things like strcat are defined in ansi c, and they use null terminated strings.
However, most of the ansi-c libs are tiny and pretty easy to rewrite. So yea, you could certainly define your own string struct and libs to deal with it.
I think if you're having an endiness problem, well, QUIT USING THE SHIFT OPERATOR; or prepare to write that code over for every platform (not that big a deal).
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-06
What it sounds like you're saying is, "Gee, if everyone just wrote their programs for x runtime, everything would be peachy." Isn't that the same as arguing that everyone just write for x hardware architecture, and that will solve all portablity problems?
I don't think moving the portablity problem from hardware to x virtual machine is a silver bullet. It just moves the problem somewhere else. Porting VMs is sometimes more difficult than just porting the program that would have run on it on the first place.
Endiness isn't that big of a problem. You have what: two possibilities? Most portability problems in C result from misuse/understanding of types or making broad assumptions.
Also, null terminated byte arrays are a library convention. It's not a language feature. If you want to manipulate unicode, use the proper library.
Now, don't go on a flame fest just yet. I don't advocate using C for large application programs. I'm definately in the python/lisp camp; however, I don't blame C for begin deficient for features (or the lack of them) that were specifically meant to model the hardware closely. Richie wasn't a moron after all.