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klysm 14 hours ago

The closer and deeper you look into the C toolchains the more grossed out you’ll be

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acuozzo 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Hands have to get dirty somewhere. "As deep as The Worker's City lay underground, so high above towered the City of Metropolis."

The choices are:

1. Restrict the freedom of CPU designers to some approximation of the PDP11. No funky DSP chips. No crazy vector processors.

2. Restrict the freedom of OS designers to some approximation of Unix. No bespoke realtime OSes. No research OSes.

3. Insist programmers use a new programming language for these chips and OSes. (This was the case prior to C and Unix.)

4. Insist programmers write in assembly and/or machine code. Perhaps a macro-assembler is acceptable here, but this is inching toward C.

The cost of this flexibility is gross tooling to make it manageable. Can it be done without years and years of accrued M4 and sh? Perhaps, but that's just CMake and CMake is nowhere near as capable as Autotools & friends are when working with legacy platforms.

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klysm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no real technical justification for the absolute shit show that is the modern C toolchain

	▲	moralestapia 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I like C/C++ a lot, A LOT, and I agree with your comment. Man, if this got fixed it would be one of the best languages to develop for. My wishlist: * Quick compilation times (obv.) or some sort of tool that makes it feel like an interpreted language, at least when you're developing, then do the usual compile step to get an optimized binary. * A F...... CLEAR AND CONSISTENT WAY TO TELL THE TOOLCHAIN THIS LIBRARY IS HERE AND THIS ONE IS OVER THERE (sorry but, come on ...). * A single command line argument to output a static binary. * Anything that gets us closer to the "build-once run-anywhere" philosophy of "Cosmopolitan Libc". Even if an intermediate execution layer is needed. One could say, "oh, but this is C, not Java", but it is already de facto a broken Java, because you still need an execution layer, call it stdlib, GLIB, whatever, if those shared libraries are not on your system with their exact version matching, your program breaks ... Just stop pretending and ship the "C virtual machine", lmao.