On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 13:17:14 UTC, Manu wrote:
But that's not a concern for typical programmers. That the
responsibility
of sysadmins.
What I meant was, 'what's more valuable [to a programmer]...'
Leaning dangerously close to philosophy here :)
Did you use many different compilers? I am afraid that doing
that on a
common basis is feat of strength beyond my imagination :)
Yup. Over the past 10 years, my day job involved:
...
Well, you are much more proficient and experienced C programmer
than me :P (And than I will ever be considering I have no desire
to return to that world) It is clearly beyond my imagination. I
have been investigating dissassembly only to verify which stuff
actually gets there and which not and debugging of course.
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 mean C-like-native-languages? There's not really anything C
offers that
C++/D doesn't also offer at the lowest level.
Right now problem is not with stuff C offers and D not. It is
stuff that D offers on top and you are forced to fight to get
back to C level of simplicity.
Our choice to use C rather than C++ was in a sense, a funny way
to enforce
a coding standard. Like I say, it forces simplicity, and a
consistent
approach to problems.
When I was speaking about "domains where C is still necessary" I
was not opposing it to C++ but other modern languages in general.
Even real-time service development is quite possible using stuff
like Erlang these days. Okay, there is also gamedev which I won't
dare to speak about :) But in general there is no much sense to
speak about replacing C and imagining any "normal" userspace
application, even performance-critical.
Some time ago I have been part of project that completely changed
my image of what C domain can be. It remains most mind-blowing
experience in my programming history (which is damn short of
course but can't resist dramatical intro). Project was in mobile
networking / LTE domain with huge amount of people involved all
over the world. Specifically our team in Latvia was responsible
for node cluster software which acted essentially as a giant
router + firewall. Actual nodes were custom multi-core MIPS
machines with h/w implementation of event loop and part of IP
stack handling. All actual packet processing code ran as barebone
executables - no OS, not virtual memory or any fancy stuff, just
platform SDK you take to build single processing binary which is
than loaded at hard-coded memory address (all remaining memory is
pre-allocated for packet handling purposes). No really
complicated processing algorithms or anything like that but
everyone was extremely picky about tiny details how this binary
was actually running - making sure no instruction cache misses
happen under normal workflow for each core, connection context
struct fits into single cache line and stuff like that. And one
of my responsibilities was actual performance testing of that
system so I could have observed how much of an impact those
seemingly small tweaks have made.
And now every time I hear that "language X can do all stuff C
can" I imagine myself trying to sell this to other guys working
on that project and have an extremely hard time doing this even
in my imagination.
