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

LEt'S GO BAYBEEEE IT'S A LOGIC ERROR IT COULD PROBABLY HAPPEN IN EVERY LANGUAGE THE COPIUM CAN OFFICIALLY CONTINUE THAT C AND C++ ARE FINE!

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/technical-details-on-todays-outage/

All behavior is now undefined.

The back and forth on the edits for C23 has resulted in the publication deadline passing before getting a copy of C23 ISO-approved. Thus, ISO have automatically cancelled ISO/IEC 9899:2023.

The Nasal Demons are coming. Your code has nowhere to run. Your code cannot hide.

And neither can you.

https://www.iso.org/standard/82075.html

... Oh. Uh. How badly would everyone hate me if I wrote a paper that allowed

T foo[2];
and
T[2] foo;

to mean the same thing as far as type declarations go in C?

Hot C take:

no string library anyone writes is going to be good enough for general-purpose use without a real slice type.

I go touch grass for a few days and when I come back C is illegal????

This shit sucks.

PSA since it hit my inbox:

You do not need to put your "legal name" (????) on a Standards Paper. You can submit a paper from Little Blorbo and make your company name "self". Whether or not you'll want to live down being Little Blorbo for the rest of C's history is on you.

2024 and we're still having these stupid-ass issues because crusty C codebases can't add a X_ or an X11_ in front of their macros. Every C codebase treating the whole world like its own backyard and not something to share, and then suddenly it's just Infinite Problems.

Please, please just get into the habit of using a prefix. You don't have namespaces. You need to be disciplined. I don't care what you pick as a prefix, just HAVING ONE makes it easy enough to refactor and not break the whole world even if we do have to change it.

Remember, everyone:

PREFIX YOUR MACROS
PREFIX YOUR MACROS
PREFIX YOUR MACROS
PREFIX YOUR MACROS

PREFIX.

YOUR.

MACROS!!!!!!

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/10803

how could i have not known this whole time.

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.