My advice on implementing stuff in C: [LWN.net]

My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 17, 2010 19:14 UTC (Sun) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: My advice on implementing stuff in C: by jzbiciak
Parent article: Russell: On C Library Implementation

C99 has diverged considerably from C89, the forking point of "extern C". The biggest headaches for me are named initializers and compound literals, both of which are used in headers and macros of newish C code.

While the different kinds of casts are nice in C++, casting is frowned upon in both C and C++. Bjarne says that he purposefully made casting in C++ ugly to dissuade people from casting, and that part of the design criteria of C++ was to reduce the need to cast. And yet in actual code I see casting as far more prevalent in C++ than in C, maybe because people see the feature and feel it was put there to use freely; I dunno. Much complexity was added to replace the loss of implicit void pointer conversions, and I'm not sure there was any net gain. In any event, it's a PITA at the boundary of C and C++

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My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 17, 2010 19:50 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

I hear you on the missing named initializers. I had forgotten about that. I guess, other than using restrict generously, I haven't started using too many C99-specific features.

I didn't know about the compound literals.... nifty!

I don't use a lot of casting, personally, but where I do, I like the ability to specify what exactly I'm trying to accomplish. Where I use casting most is in embedded programming, where I need to cast between a pointer type and an unsigned int. That comes up a lot when talking to peripherals. reinterpret_cast makes it so much clearer what I'm trying to do, IMHO.

My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 17, 2010 23:47 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> And yet in actual code I see casting as far more prevalent in C++ than in C

I suspect this is simply because you *can* see the casting in C++: a "static_cast<Whatever *>(x)" sticks out like a sore thumb, vs the almost-invisible C-style parenthesized type expression.