Hello!

I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.

I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
something like that. One of the hits was this article:

https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming

It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
and certainly not limited to Unices.

br,
KK

On Friday, 25 August 2023 at 19:28:21 UTC+1, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
> decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.
>
> I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
> something like that. One of the hits was this article:
>
> https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming
>
> It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
> and certainly not limited to Unices.
>
Unix is no longer especially important for C, though Unix does come with a C
compiler installed which can be run from the commandline with a simple "cc",
which makes it easy to write scratch C programs.

C has two main uses. The first is in small embedded systems where its closeness
to machine code means that very tight and efficent prgrams can be written. SInce
it's easy to extend the language to allow for absolute addresses, C can also be used
to directly access hardware.
The second use is in the algorithmic core of a large application which is doing something
computationally complex. The more complex the problem, the simpler you want the
programming language to be. And because it is easy to call functions written in C
from most other programming languages, the choice of C makes the code more
generally useful.

On 25/08/2023 20:28, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
> decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.

I'd take Bart's comments with more than a pinch of salt. He has a
strong dislike for C and Unix, and habitually and intentionally
misunderstands both in order to spread FUD about them. It's a bit
silly, really.

>
> I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
> something like that. One of the hits was this article:
>
> https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming
>
> It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
> and certainly not limited to Unices.
>

C has its origins in the Unix world, and a lot of C tools, compilers,
and code come from there. But it spread widely.

C has a few key features that make it unique. It is a high-level
language (defined by a set of standards and an "abstract machine"), but
low-level and suitable for systems programming and high speed code. It
is stable - to a very large extent, you don't need to deal with
continual changes to the language, and old code will work just as well
as new code. And there are good quality tools available for almost all
systems.

So C can be seen as the lowest common denominator for programming.
Interfaces between libraries are often described in C terms. Higher
level languages run on virtual machines, that are written in C.
Low-level libraries are written in C. OS's are often written in C.
This is common to pretty much all operating systems.

It is also extremely common in embedded systems and microcontrollers,
where you want low overheads.

On 8/25/2023 11:28 AM, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
> decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.
>
> I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
> something like that. One of the hits was this article:
>
> https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming
>
> It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
> and certainly not limited to Unices.

Fwiw, The kernel for WinNT 4.0 is written in C.

On Saturday, 26 August 2023 at 10:17:35 UTC+3, Malcolm McLean wrote:
> On Friday, 25 August 2023 at 19:28:21 UTC+1, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
> > decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.
> >
> > I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
> > something like that. One of the hits was this article:
> >
> > https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming
> >
> > It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
> > and certainly not limited to Unices.
> >
> Unix is no longer especially important for C, though Unix does come with a C
> compiler installed which can be run from the commandline with a simple "cc",
> which makes it easy to write scratch C programs.
>
> C has two main uses. The first is in small embedded systems where its closeness
> to machine code means that very tight and efficent prgrams can be written. SInce
> it's easy to extend the language to allow for absolute addresses, C can also be used
> to directly access hardware.
> The second use is in the algorithmic core of a large application which is doing something
> computationally complex. The more complex the problem, the simpler you want the
> programming language to be. And because it is easy to call functions written in C
> from most other programming languages, the choice of C makes the code more
> generally useful.

Also C is often used as integration layer between programming languages that lack
such interoperability layer.

On 26/08/2023 23:36, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:
> On 8/25/2023 11:28 AM, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
>> decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.
>>
>> I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
>> something like that. One of the hits was this article:
>>
>>
>> https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming
>>
>> It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
>> and certainly not limited to Unices.
>
> Fwiw, The kernel for WinNT 4.0 is written in C.
>

A lot of Windows seems to be written in C, and the early APIs were
expressed as C declaration (now those same ones are called 'C++' but
there's no C++ stuff in there).

But I didn't use Windows until the mid-90s.

So I was programming for nearly 20 years on OSes that weren't written in
C: MSDOS, CP/M (our version of it definitely wasn't), and assorted
non-Unix OSes before that.

And of course I never used C myself until the mid-90s, and then mainly
using libraries with C APIs.

It certainly didn't seem to be ruling that the world at that period!

But, apparently writing a new OS is such a difficult task, that no-one
bothers anymore. Other you use Windows, or use Linux, or build one on
top of Linux.

So C ends up being ensconced nearly everywhere, and insinuating itself
everywhere else.

I don't have a problem at all such such a level of language being used,
since mine works in the same way.

But I do have a tremendous problem with how that language is designed
(and, also, with its retinue of tools that seem to go with it, that
appear to be of the same standard: crudely put togther apps that never
grew up).

So it's a shame that the computing world is underpinned by a language
that provides this chaotic set of integer types:

char, signed char, unsigned char, short, unsigned short,
int, unsigned int, long, unsigned long, long long int,
unsigned long long int (or long unsigned int long etc),
int8_t, uint8_t, int16_t, uint16_t, int32_t, uint32_t,
int64_t, uint64_t, 8 *fast* and 8 *least* types,
intptr_t, uintptr_t, size_t, ssize_t, intmax_t, uintmax_t,
wchar_t, ptrdiff_t, clock_t, offset_t, time_t, ...

and where you need employ external tools, or apply an algorithm, in
order to decode a type declaration.

Am 25.08.2023 um 20:28 schrieb Kalevi Kolttonen:
> Hello!
>
> I read Bart's post about C being married to Unix and
> decided to start a new thread about C's prevalence.
> I simply tried googling "what platforms does C support" or
> something like that. One of the hits was this article:
> https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-still-powered-by-c-programming
> It seems to me that C is in very widespread use even today
> and certainly not limited to Unices.

The problem with C is that it is easy to learn, but it's much
more effort to write stable software in C than in other languages.
In C++ there's much to learn but you have a fraction of the code.

On 26/08/2023 23:36, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:
> Fwiw, The kernel for WinNT 4.0 is written in C.

Worth even less is that most of Novell Netware is (was?) written in C.

Andy

On Friday, August 25, 2023 at 9:28:21 PM UTC+3, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote:
nothing

On 8/27/2023 1:02 PM, Vir Campestris wrote:
> On 26/08/2023 23:36, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:
>> Fwiw, The kernel for WinNT 4.0 is written in C.
>
> Worth even less is that most of Novell Netware is (was?) written in C.

What is worse, C, or a system implementing C, written in C?