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Eric Raymond: "The long goodbye to C"

posted by Fnord666 on Friday November 10 2017, @06:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the C,-C-Rust,-C-Rust-Go,-Go-Rust-Go! dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In which ESR pontificates on the future while reflecting on the past.

I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the systems-programming heap – Go and Rust, in particular. I reached a startling realization – I have 35 years of experience in C. I write C code pretty much every week, but I can no longer remember when I last started a new project in C!
...
I started to program just a few years before the explosive spread of C swamped assembler and pretty much every other compiled language out of mainstream existence. I'd put that transition between about 1982 and 1985. Before that, there were multiple compiled languages vying for a working programmer's attention, with no clear leader among them; after, most of the minor ones were simply wiped out. The majors (FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL) were either confined to legacy code, retreated to single-platform fortresses, or simply ran on inertia under increasing pressure from C around the edges of their domains.

Then it stayed that way for nearly thirty years. Yes, there was motion in applications programming; Java, Perl, Python, and various less successful contenders. Early on these affected what I did very little, in large part because their runtime overhead was too high for practicality on the hardware of the time. Then, of course, there was the lock-in effect of C's success; to link to any of the vast mass of pre-existing C you had to write new code in C (several scripting languages tried to break that barrier, but only Python would have significant success at it).

One to RTFA rather than summarize. Don't worry, this isn't just ESR writing about how great ESR is.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 10 2017, @11:28PM (2 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 10 2017, @11:28PM (#595407)

    > If your server's customers cared about throughput and latency, they'd be demanding
    > that everything be written in C++ or similar. Are they? Didn't think so.

    It's cute how you're telling yourself a nice story that matches the conclusion you want to reach. Which soundtrack did you put in the background?

    Some of us have to design against specs, because our customers have system requirements to meet in order to make money with our products. The actual language doesn't matter, as long as the specs are met, on time and on budget. Can we meet the spec with the overhead, and can we find all the supporting code in $fashionable_language? Will we be able to provide the ten years of support? How long will it take to figure those questions out?

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 10 2017, @11:57PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 10 2017, @11:57PM (#595409)

    To indicate that you are quoting someone, use the "<blockquote>…</blockquote>" construct.

    You know what? Maybe this is why all software sucks ass; you people just don't give a fuck about doing things "correctly".