Hi Larry! On 11/13/22 21:45, Larry McVoy wrote: > None of this surprises me but it reminds me of how I described C to > my older son who is learning computer science. > > C is sort of like driving a sports car on a narrow mountain road with > no guard rails. If you like to text while you drive, C is not for you. > If you can't keep your eyes on the road, C is not for you. If you are > a bad driver (programmer, duh), C is not for you. But if you are an > expert driver, like to go fast, pay attention, C is just fine, great > in fact. > > Source: been a C programmer for more than 40 years, have written > commercially used products over and over again in C. I love C, I get > that it is not for everyone but it is an excellent language in the hands > of expert programmers. Hi Larry!
I missed your reply; would have CCd you too (but you probably will get it from the list anyway). I agree most of the time, but there are still rough corners that need to be polished. See below.
On 11/13/22 22:20, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
See for example some (part of a) change that I did for optimizing some code, where I transformed pointers to char to char arrays (following Ulrich Drepper's article about libraries). The global change using arrays instead of pointers reduced the code size in a couple of KiB, IIRC, which for cache misses might be an important thing.-static const char *log_levels[] = { +static const char log_levels[][8] = { "alert", "error", "warn", "notice", "info", "debug", };As a note, I used 8 for better alignment, but 7 would have been fine. Now, let's imagine that I append the following element to the array: "messages"? Values of beta will give rise to dom!Do I really need to load a gun and point it to my feet just to get that performance? Wouldn't it be nice to use -Wunterminated-strings and let the compiler yell at me if I write a string literal with 8 letters? I mean, it should be simple for a compiler to implement that, and I would be sooo much happier!
This is not at all like driving a fast car and being an excellent driver. This is like driving a fast car in that narrow mountain, and knowing that closing your eyes will make you even faster. Will you close them? :)
Did nobody in the last 40 years, or more, realize how ****ing unsafe that construct is? Is the compiler warning so hard to implement? Or maybe it exists but is not on by default and I never heard of it...
Cheers, Alex -- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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