Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 13, 2007 15:22 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The problem is that everyone's idea of which bit is useful differs from
everyone else's, so that while you may not pay for what you don't use, you
still have to *learn* it if you want to maintain code written by anyone
else.

In practice projects aren't written in `C++'; they're written in `some
subset of C++', and developers familiar with one subset can find it quite
a hump to get over to switch to some other project using a different
subset. (This is true of all large languages to an extent, and of course
every big project has its own internal APIs that you have to learn: but
this does increase the burden a bit more.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 15, 2007 18:13 UTC (Sat) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

C does try hard to avoid people using different subsets, by the simple solution of providing so little that you have no choice but to have a very large common subset between different projects (some stuff is not that used, like C99 variadic macros, and other not at all, like trigraphs).

Me, I like type checking (no, this filetype_t enum is not compatible with that filemode_t enum, thank you!).

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 15, 2007 21:06 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Variadic macros do get used, but mostly in header files, often below
comments reading something like

/* Deep magic below. No user-serviceable parts inside.
You have been warned. */

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 16, 2007 2:35 UTC (Sun) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

For sure, but in my opinion, this is also where something like the implementation of the C++ "function", "bind" and "lambda" go. They are incredibly easy to use ("function" behaves just like a function pointer, basically, only better), but yow, here be dragons in the implementation! I'm responsible for at least one pre-"function" implementation of that idea, I suggest using the standard one over implementing your own any day of the week!

While I am myself a C++ programmer, and I feel that nowadays, C has more or less been obsoleted by C++ for what I do (if you're careful about the subset you're using, you can even use it for most kernel programming, there are only very few specific exceptions, like the tendency of GCC of putting things it could put in the text segment in the data segment instead), I have to agree 100% with Linus there. C is harder, but forces people to think things thorough, and while that raises the barrier to entry for contributors, that's good.

It's kind of frustrating, because I'd like to make it easier for myself, but when it's easier, the idiots come out of the woodworks with braindead patches up the wazoo... It's one thing I've observed over and over, that it's simple to see what's easy to do, you'll find a bunch of them, all poorly implemented. Visual Basic made GUI applications easy, and PHP/ASP did the same for web applications, see what happened there...