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ninkendo 3 hours ago

C's string handling is so abominably terrible that sometimes all people really need is "C with std::string".

Oh, and smart pointers too.

And hash maps.

Vectors too while we're at it.

I think that's it.

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WalterBright 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When I developed D, a major priority was string handling. I was inspired by Basic, which had very straightforward, natural strings. The goal was to be as good as Basic strings.

And it wasn't hard to achieve. The idea was to use length delimited strings rather than 0 terminated. This meant that slices of strings being strings is a superpower. No more did one have to constantly allocate memory for a slice, and then keep track of that memory.

Length-delimited also super speeded string manipulation. One no longer had to scan a string to find its length. This is a big deal for memory caching.

Static strings are length delimited too, but also have a 0 at the end, which makes it easy to pass string literals to C functions like printf. And, of course, you can append a 0 to a string anytime.

	▲	jfaulken 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Just want to off-topic-nerd-out for a second and thank you for Empire.

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teo_zero 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree on the former two (std::string and smart pointers) because they can't be nicely implemented without some help from the language itself.

The latter two (hash maps and vectors), though, are just compound data types that can be built on top of standard C. All it would need is to agree on a new common library, more modern than the one designed in the 70s.

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ninkendo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I think a vec is important for the same reason a string is… because being able to properly get the length, and standardized ways to push/pop from them that don’t require manual bounds checking and calls to realloc.

Hash maps are mostly only important because everyone ought to standardize on a way of hashing keys.

But I suppose they can both be “bring your own”… to me it’s more that these types are so fundamental and so “table stakes” that having one base implementation of them guaranteed by the language’s standard lib is important.

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uecker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

why not std::string?

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teo_zero an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You can surely create a std::string-like type in C, call it "newstring", and write functions that accept and return newstrings, and re-implement the whole standard library to work with newstrings, from printf() onwards. But you'll never have the comfort of newstring literals. The nice syntax with quotes is tied to zero-terminated strings. Of course you can litter your code with preprocessor macros, but it's inelegant and brittle.

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direwolf20 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a class, so it doesn't work in C.

	▲	uecker 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but you can have a similar string abstraction in C. What would you miss? The overloaded operators?