C Programming Language

1323 readers

29 users here now

Welcome to the C community!

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
... When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
... The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

irc: #c

🌐 https://en.cppreference.com/w/c

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

thomas@lemmy.douwes.co.uk

modev@programming.dev

Why do some C devs prefer using mainly C89 over C23? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net to c/c_lang@programming.dev

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have watched some developers giving advice about using C for general software development, i noticed that a not insignificant amount of them are strictly using C89, vaguely gesturing that more recent versions of C are less dependable, or more broken.

I would appreciate if anyone here can explain the specifics, as me not being a C developer (yet) and looking over the source code of some libraries which do heavily use modern C features, for example to have a defer-like macro (using attributes, or the 2 for statement trick), or generic data structures (using manual name mangling).

I understand these examples are strictly not how C is usually used, and are common in other more modern languages, which may turn some developers away from using these, my main question is "why exactly?".

I don't mind being given further reading about this, so if you have an article in mind, it too would be greatly appreciated.

note: in the title i referred to C23, but it could be anything post C89/C99 depending on the subject matter.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

They haven't bothered to update their knowledge about it. And why should they? They got gud with C89 and can write software that works with it. So since they don't know how to, when they use the modern stuff they break things; they haven't learnt the footguns yet. The same way a n00b would write broken software with any version of C. That feels bad so they reject it. It's like how everyone thinks the music from when they were a teenager is the best music. Starting learning from nothing it's probably better to learn the new stuff too, but if you're maintaining software written with one version it's probably not worth updating it and so you'll need to just work with what there is.

Although if you really need generics and other more advanced language features and you're starting a new project from scratch it might be better to go with something like rust at this point.

[–] BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net 1 points 13 hours ago

I don't know if I'd assume the same about them, as the way the argument was worded made it seem the new features aren't a positive, or are broken in some way, or at least gave the appearance of the actual reason being technical and not skill.

I was originally thinking of the use case for C is when you need to have something in a closed ecosystem, as in no dependencies, so generics made sense as an example, and while I'm aware one can use rust, it usually enables (and in a sense encourages) pulling in many dependencies, which is not always desirable.