Max (max@a.com) on 7/1/10 wrote:
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>C is pretty uncontroversial these days. It's hard to even get an argument started
>since everyone has made their peace with it.

True.

I used to have that opinion, too. However, lately I've been working on a open standards based C language derivative and it's becoming increasingly clear just how creaky C is as we work through all the different ways that it has to be fixed to get different platforms to return the same answer and perform decently. The fundamental problem with C in my book falls into three major areas:

1) Weak support for threading. The timing of operations is at times over-described or under-described.

2) No SIMD vector support / failure to standardize types early on -- how big is an int anyway? A double? What is the bit pattern for these things? (I group these together because many algorithms for vectors require fixed data representations.)

3) Most of all -- The language is conversion-happy. Following basic hardware models of 50 years ago, it tries to convert everything to a core hardware type, do the work, and convert back. All the conversions are a problem, because they make it difficult to precisely describe an algorithm -- what you see is not what you get. E.g. short << 16, forces a conversion to int (of what size?) before the shift occurs, so if you right shift again later, those bits might be there or might not.

There is at least some excuse for item 2. C has to handle the widest diversity of devices out there. However, in general, modern processors handle most of this stuff now, and there is increasingly less and less good reason to keep around those that don't. Modern processors are usually multicore. Many ISAs now have special instructions for different integer and floating point encodings. They have SIMD vector units. If C were developed today, it would probably not look the way it does, because many of the core assumptions about the appearance of the underlying device no longer hold.

To be clear, I'm not asking for garbage collection, OOP, or saccharine Javaness to be added to C. That is what Java is for. I just want a WYSIWYG programming language that is portable between multiple ISAs.