By relying on github for the latter while redirecting to another mirror for the former allows you to utilise github's reputational system to promote both your project AND the mirroring alternative.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307098
> Inspired by datatype99, but consisting of one small standard-conforming C99 macro-only header that is fast to compile.
In the context of C99, isn't tagged union the more usual name instead of sum type?
Take one of the most basic sum types in Haskell's base library, Maybe:
data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a
Sure it has trade offs like being empty by exception, but that's necessary if you don't want it to allocate.
Also, pattern matching would be nice instead of std::get with visitor, but that's more of a language issue than an std::variant issue
Wait, what does one have to do with the other?
It's probably a more relevant tool for a larger class of problems than many people imagine.
Anyone thinking of trying this I would advise against going to C directly. The footguns are dangerous enough as it is and are arguably even more dangerous if you're coming from a more modern language that if you came at C directly. You don't need to go this far back in time to have these things.
But I do strongly agree that anyone who has done nothing by dynamic scripting language development should pick up a modern static language and learn how to use it. I consider having at least one of each a basic tool in the well-rounded developer's toolkit. And if you're still running on 200x-era arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of static versus dynamic languages, as many people are, you're going to be pleasantly surprised by the modern static languages.
But you won't be pleasantly surprised by C. Most of the arguments developed for static vs. dynamic in that era were really about dynamic versus C. They all still apply; C qua C has not moved much since then.
(Maybe you could justify C as "closer to the metal" but in the modern era personally I'd recommend just going straight to assembly for orientation and a tour. You don't have to dive super deep into it to get the sense.)
I think some devs are fed up of Complexity and excessive abstractions.
C has very few language features, it's a very simple language -- while all modern languages have new (complex and taxing) features.
It's kinda like a Minimalist movement, can we do the same Modern Mumbo Jumbo but in a simple, minimalistic C way?
GC and RAII? Nah, just use Arenas/Pools. Or don't use heap at all.
C is an unsafe language but modern tools get better and better every year, with GCC doing really cool static analysis and finding buffer overflows at compile time.
Also, C runs anywhere and everywhere.
This will solve more than 90% of problems. I'll also add that replace C pointers with a "Fat Pointer" or Go-like slice struct and avoid the C stdlib. Then you'll have fixed 99% of issues.
Did C ever go away? The computing industry is built on C. It is the foundation underpinning everything.
> Are their good reasons to be using C in product development rather than more modern languages?
Even if you use a "modern" programming language you'll be building on C at some level. Linux, Postgres, Redis, CPython, etc. are all written in C. Most programming languages have a C FFI for a reason. It is worthwhile to familiarize yourself with C if only to have an understanding of what underpins everything. Besides, you never know, you might need to write a native Python module or Postgres plugin one day.
I'd be curious to see how new developers do with Rust out of the gate moving forward. It basically makes you generate a machine checkable proof that you're using advanced memory management techniques correctly, and those techniques were invented to make zero cost abstractions work in C++.
Anyway, for me, it's Rust for all new projects these days, but I still like the minimalism of C. Big companies say it takes about 6 months for strong engineers unfamiliar with all this stuff to reach productivity with Rust. I'd guess those same engineers could get to the point of writing sort-of-correct C in a week or so.
I would not reach to c libraries on many other platforms but recently I started using more c, just not from c..
Thats my observation at least. I also think C is just so frictionless, that even if it is dangerous people will use it anyway. Yes there are a thousand footguns like people have said, but in the end you can get something compiling and running pretty easily, which is enough I guess.
Things that you hope will be used in widely different contexts need to be created using tools that can easily be "glued" into those widely different contexts.
Right now, C remains the best glue language we have. If you want to write things that can be used from dozens of other languages (or even just 2 other languages), you are likely to write it in C.
In 5-10 years time? We'll see (no pun intended)
I mean, there's a reason why Karpathy is hacking on "llm.c" as part of his "clean up the world" project and not "llm.rs".
Is that a good thing or bad thing? I won't engage. But I think that's where the psychology is. For myself, I genuinely love C in a way that it's clear I never will Rust.
You post this as if everyone is supposed to know who Karpathy is or what any of that means...