Notices by ThePhD (thephd@pony.social), page 3

Y'all. This coffee machine broke down in this place and from the back entryway the most butch lass decked in heavy tool-laden belts, hand-repaired headphones, a weighty backpack and the most relaxed work fit just walked in. And.... and.

Lesbians, I get it.

I should make TikTok series where I post one video every two weeks or something doing a brief 2 minute braindump of a C feature.

I cosign everything in this blog and I want to emphasize that I will do everything in my power to provide a solution for the C problems present here!

https://davidben.net/2024/01/15/empty-slices.html

I don't know how else to explain to people that you get the outcomes you shill for. If you have sincere thoughts on how things are going, SPEAK UP. Especially if you're literally The Super Smart Guy.

I've read the old meeting minutes and some of the old papers, I get the older iterations of the C Committee either ignored you or didn't do anything with your feedback. That's not me. I really need you to start saying shit, ON THE RECORD.

Been trying to formulate an e-mail about this that I want to send back to somebody. I'm going to delete this paragraph from the e-mail but it's something that bothers me so much about working on C:

”… the community never grasps proposals or anything related to it, or reads the paper trail, so suddenly they're shocked or surprised when things go into C or change C. And then they advocate at the literal last minute (or post-last-minute). Even now, most of the feedback I get comes in later and later, and often it's sent as private e-mails that I can't publish or point to in order to say "hey, look, here's this thing we've done that has had genuinely good impact". Sometimes, the folks in these groups never communicate at all; if I don't literally dive into their Discord/Slack/mailing list/personally reach out, it never gets to me. Or anyone, for that matter; it's just a bottle of sentiments that never go anywhere. I cannot begin to explain to you the number of times I've heard feedback from e.g. [REDACTED] Employees or people in the [REDACTED] Division or some old, ancient Really Smart Assembly Guy at [REDACTED] happy with the work some of us are doing, but as like a small e-mail or a passing thought in a DM. And believe me, I appreciate that e-mail/DM/message a whole hell of a lot and it gives me motivation to keep fighting! But it also puts a lot of pressure on me to keep being the "Emissary" on behalf of this sea of people that are reasonably powerful and could change the flow of the tide with a single public post.... anywhere. But they don't. So I have to keep shouldering a ton of this work on my back, and every time it just looks like I'm some stupid upstart ruining C and not carrying the wishes of so many people on my back; and it's STUPIDLY frustrating.“

Some folks are sleeping on this part of C, but this is now well-defined and working code in the latest C23 thanks to @uecker , @JensGustedt , and @erisceleste:

https://godbolt.org/z/Gd4j6nnv3

LLVM provides several so-called "Intermediate Representations" (IRs), which are somewhere in between machine code and the code that most programmers write, but in a way that is language-agnostic.

(* Rust people break in through the door *) "LIKE HELL IT IS, LLVM IS SO C-BRAINED." (The Rust people are correct.)

55'000 tests, and not a single failure? When does that ever happen on the first try after major surgery?

Holy shit. they pulled it off. Flang did it.

As such, there was renewed vigour in the Fortran compiler space, and several important developments happened in short succession.

YEEAH FORTRAN COMING BACK LIKE A PHOENIX FROM THE EGGY ASHES BAYBEEEEEEE

… LLVM, and its flagship compiler Clang. This was an absolutely massive undertaking, but due to its cross-platform nature, permissive licensing, and modular infrastructure, has become the focal point.…

And thank god, because GCC would've been dicks if that was the standard.

Same with C's death, of course. God what I wouldn't give for C to be well and truly dead, but every Professor, PL engineer, etc. all high on the supply kept trying to sell me on the fact that C (and C++) was gonna die, except it never did lmaoooo.

While Fortran has long been the butt of the joke in IT departments the world over, in a curious twist of fate, it has seen a dramatic resurgence over the last few years. …

News of Fortran's death were greatly exaggerated, etc. etc.

 Why is Fortran still used in so many places?

Eternal question I'd actually like an answer to, so here I go reading!!

 For example, the C & C++ ecosystems never managed to standardise any sort of build & distribution mechanism, and since Python is wrapping around basically any flavour of C & C++ code, the problems in Python packaging are a superset of what's already a hugely pressing issue in C/C++.

God yes. Finally, somebody understands why a lot of us keep going down to the barebones levels to get things done. You can't just Rust/Java/etc. you're way out of the fundamental computing problems, buckaroo, you've got to face the music eventually!!!

@mirabilos @dalias @nabijaczleweli Oh, no, we can't change the return value of a function like printf or otherwise. I forgot about the return value of the printf family of functions.

Well, okay; guess I just gotta throw this paper out and wait until we have a not-crap fmt facilitiy; it's not worth writing a new form of the existing like 16+ formatting functions for specifically this. Might as well wait until a better, more type-safe formatting facility.

@tthbaltazar Not my wheelhouse entirely, but there's also systems with a 16-bit intand a 32-bit size_t. Which makes this problem infinitely worse.

@tthbaltazar I (occasionally) work on large systems where we handle data that easily overflows a 4 byte integer. I would like to not accidentally have an overflow vulnerability in my printing routines.

@nabijaczleweli

Hey, when I publish the paper for %z*.s everyone on the Committee is gonna bother me about not having it implemented anywhere. Do you know any C libraries where they're not stiff-neck about extensions of this nature?

@tthbaltazar Extension for printf to use size_t for the size of string printouts.

Today, you can only have a size as big as INT_MAX, because printf's precision modifier for strings is spec'd to be int:

Please read share, and comment:

C2y/C3a Proposal - Improved attribute((cleanup(...))) through defer
https://thephd.dev/_vendor/future_cxx/papers/C%20-%20Improved%20__attribute__((cleanup))%20Through%20defer.html