On Thursday, 4 February 2016 at 23:35:46 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
Just because *sometimes* the source code of the other module must be compiled independently, is a poor excuse to skip obvious, useful safety checks *all* the time.
The context is a compilation system for building big software on very slow CPUs with kilobytes of RAM.
C was designed for always compiling independently and compiling source files that are bigger than what can be held in RAM, and also for building executables that can fill most of system RAM. So the compilation system was designed for using external memory (disk) and that affects C a lot. The forerunner for C, BCPL was a bootstrap language for writing compilers. So C is minimal by design.
BTW, C++ programmers sometimes use similar unsafe hacks of "pruned header files" to break dependencies and speed up compilation. So this is not unique to C, but C++ introduced the mangling of types into names to support overloading of functions on parameter types, which is why C++ detects (some) type issues at link time.
