On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 11:42:12 UTC, Manu wrote:
I've built a C codebase from the ground over the course of a
decade with
~25 programmers.
It takes discipline, and a certainly sense of simplicity in
your solutions.
It may work if you can afford to guarantee certain level of
competence of majority of programmers in the team but I think is
exception in practice, not rule. Also I had a bit larger teams in
mind as it tends to happen with enterprise C :)
and what is more valuable than a
programmers time?
At some point new servers + server maintenance becomes more
expensive than programmers time. Much more expensive.
I still consider C a macro assembler... I can easily (and
usually do)
visualise the asm output I expect the compiler to produce while
I'm coding.
If I'm writing performance intensive code, I am constantly
disassembling
and checking that the compiler is producing the code I am
expecting. This
feels normal to me.
Did you use many different compilers? I am afraid that doing that
on a common basis is feat of strength beyond my imagination :)
What would you want inline assembly for in D? Inline assembly
is almost
always a mistake, unless you're writing a driver.
I can't find code Adam used to provide minimal d runtime stubs to
compile C-like programs but he was forced to use in-line assembly
there in few cases. Can't remember details, sorry.
And of course I am speaking about drivers / kernels / barebone. I
can't imagine any other domain where using C is still absolutely
necessary for practical reasons.
You can't possibly
schedule code better than the compiler.
...
I am not implying that one should do anything by hand because
compiler is bad at it. I have not actually used inline assembly
with C even a single time in my life. That wasn't about it.
