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procaryoteyesterday at 9:57 PM2 repliesview on HN

Is modern C really much more complicated than old C? C++ is a mess of course.


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lioetersyesterday at 10:29 PM

I don't write modern C for daily use, so I can't really say. But I've been re-learning and writing C99 more these days, not professionally but personal use - and I appreciate the smallness of the language. Might even say C peaked at C99. I mean, I'd be crazy to say that C-like languages after C99, like Java, PHP, etc., are all misguided for how unnecessarily big and complex they are. It might be that I'm becoming more like a caveman programmer as I get older, I prefer dumb primitive tools.

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anthktoday at 8:23 AM

IDK about C11; but C99 doesn't change a lot compared to ANSI C. You can read The C Programming Language 2nd edition and pick up C99 in a week. It adds boleans, some float/complex math ops, an optional floating point definition and a few more goodies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99

C++ by comparison it's a behemoth. If C++ died and, for instance, the FLTK guys rebased their libraries into C (and Boost for instance) it would be a big loss at first but Chromium and the like rewritten in C would slim down a bit, the complexity would plummet down and similar projects would use far less CPU and RAM.

It's not just about the binary size; C++ today makes even the Common Lisp standard (even with UIOP and some de facto standard libraries from QuickLisp) pretty much human-manageable, and CL always has been a one-thousand pages thick standard with tons of bloat compared to Scheme or it's sibling Emacs Lisp. Go figure.

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