Comment by 🚀 stack

=> Re: "SIS Progress Update: One Year Later" | In: u/clseibold

And apologies for hijacking your thread. I simply wished your code was accessible to me, and got triggered into a weirdly inappropriate C apologism!

=> 🚀 stack

Jan 18 · 1 day ago

2 Later Comments ↓

=> 🚀 clseibold [OP] · Jan 18 at 08:20:

@stack It's fine about the hijacking. I don't really mind.

Obviously modern languages aren't perfect, but I find their benefits to be significantly better than C's downsides. And yet Golang has some things I absolutely hate, and a GC, Rust is so complicated you have to spend a month relearning programming, and Zig's syntax is so awful I will never touch zig.

About the slices and interning, I'm well aware that they are not new, and this is precisely my point - C and C programmers got rid of old ideas that were useful.

Part of it was because C has to be so low level and compact, but over time as computers and programmers evolved, C didn't evolve with them. That's a very big problem the C standards committee is only now trying to solve, lol.

The fact that slices are integrated into the languages means they work exactly like arrays. There is almost no practical difference between a slice and an array. An array is just a pointer with a compile-time size. A slice is a pointer with a runtime size. Any array can become a slice, but a slice can't necessarily become an array, unless it's backing store is already an array. This concept is very important, because it means you can use slices like arrays. Everything you can do with byte arrays you can do with byte slices, and you can slice into arrays.

There is also no difference between using a slice vs just pointing into a string array and storing a size - that is in fact a slice!

Because strings are slices, you can use any backing memory for them. You can put a string in a contiguous fixed-size array, in a "vector" (stretchy buffer, etc.), etc. You can also reference static data in the executable.

With all of that in mind, I do not see how using slices is any worse than basing every string off an array, or a vector. In actually, the benefit of slices is that you can have a string that references into any memory allocation. In Java, your string has to be a "vector" (stretchy buffer), not so in Odin, Zig, or Rust!

But slices are not the only tool used to deal with strings. You can get bytes out of strings, codepoints, etc. All of this is very simple to do when you have slices - you can literally create a slice that references the few bytes that make up a character, or multiple codepoints (which is also sometimes necessary, as one codepoint doesn't equal one glyph), and you do this without any memory allocations or copying of data. And then if you want, you can convert that to a rune, a 32-bit integer that represents the codepoint(s) of the character(s).

So... slices, imo, are the proper way to handle strings, because they just point to any memory location, so they do not dictate allocation. That doesn't mean there aren't other tools.

Because Odin makes all strings slices, it actually forces you into dealing with the underlying data of strings, rather than just leaving it up to a library to do a bunch of allocations itself, lol. In Odin, string literals are all static data, but aside from that, you have to manually allocate some backing buffer to store any of your other strings. So the idea that you are talking about with having to think about memory is essentially required because strings are slices, and string literals are immutable.

In Golang, strings can be used and it will auto-allocate a backing buffer for you, but this is not so in Odin. This is why I think Odin is the best competitor to C in terms of lower-level programming.

Also, I believe piece tables are basically coming back because they has some nice characteristics that play well with live multi-user text editors. But anyways, slices don't dictate that you have to use piece tables, and piece tables are just one application of slicing.

=> 🚀 stack · 14 hours ago:

I don't think saying that C failed to 'evolve' with modern programming practices is a fair way of looking at it.

In my mind, C is basically a hammer -- a way to amplify and focus your energy onto a particular point or plane, without restrictions. It takes a bit of effort to figure out how to hit, and even more effort to figure out what and where to hit, not to mention when not to hit something with a hammer.

Hammers have not changed much in centuries for a good reason -- for those who know how to use them, adding fancy features and safety devices only makes them worse.

Sure, you can damage your wrist, smash a finger, or kill someone with a hammer -- or break your face by hitting a rubber tire. The product may be extremely ugly if you blindly hammer at a chunk of metal. But when used properly by even mediocre users, the results are usable.

So while adding fancy features to add 'safety', implicit handling of complicated immutable datastructures, etc. may seem like a convenience, like all training wheels it's fun right now, but a year later you may find yourself wondering why because you still can't ride a bike.

So that is why I think C will not go away in spite of calls to replace it by a modern language (and the fact that Linus is bending to accomodate the mob is making me feel that Linux may fall apart). C just does not get in the way too much.

As for slices, they are a very useful abstraction. But as a devil's advocate, I have to say that SSE instructions handling 0-terminated strings are several times faster than those working on explicitly-sized strings-- because they do not need to simultaneously track the length.

Original Post

=> 🚀 clseibold

SIS Progress Update: One Year Later — SIS is my server "suite" software that allows you to set up different smallnet servers from within a gemini admin interface. It is called Smallnet Information Services, and it was inspired by IIS. After a year and a couple of months of work, I feel it is about a couple weeks out from a beta release, which I am excited about. I have finally mostly finished a major refactor update for SIS that will better manage certificates, hosts, and setting up servers,...

=> 💬 14 comments · 3 likes · Jan 15 · 4 days ago