So basically back to C89... I'm not a fan since the changes in C99 made the language significantly more convenient, more enjoyable and actually safer, and even the MSVC C frontend has a nearly complete C99 implementation since around 2015 (the parts of C99 that matter anyway).

Case in point: the article has this somewhere in the example code:

    struct struct s;
    s.member = 42;
    s.other_member = 1138;

(ignore the syntax errors and typos, the article is full of them)

If new members are added to the struct, you end up with uninitialized memory. With C99 designated init at least the new members are zero-initialized.

Your example of an uninitialized memory situation will not be so compelling for old-school C engineers because they've "solved" the issue decades ago by integrating tools like valgrind into their work-flows. They don't expect (or require) the compiler to help them deal with issues like this.

The problem with post-C89 is that you lose the unique features of old-school C.

For example, it can be compiled on basically any platform that contains a CPU. It has tool support everywhere. And it can be fairly easily adapted to run using older C compilers going back to the 1980s.

Or that (old-school) C is basically a high level assembly language is actually a feature and not a bug. It's trivial to mentally map lines of C89 code to assembly.

No other widely available language can tick these boxes.

So the problem with later versions of C is that you lose these unique features while you are now competing for mindshare with languages that were designed in the modern age. And I just don't see it winning that battle. If I wanted a "modern" C, I'll use Zig or Rust or something.

Just because a language (C89) doesn't evolve doesn't mean it's dead.

> For example, it can be compiled on basically any platform that contains a CPU.

It will be pretty hard to find a platform which doesn't have at least a C99 compiler.

For instance even SDCC has uptodate C standard support (better than MSVC actually), and that covers most 8-bit CPUs all the way back to the 70's:

https://sdcc.sourceforge.net/

Also let's not forget that C99 is a quarter century old by now. That's about as old as K&R C was in 1999 ;)

Good point but as far as I know the author takes a stance against zero initialization in general.

There was also "boringcc"

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/boringcc

As a boring platform for the portable parts of boring crypto software, I'd like to see a free C compiler that clearly defines, and permanently commits to, carefully designed semantics for everything that's labeled "undefined" or "unspecified" or implementation-defined" in the C "standard" (DJ Bernstein)

And yeah I feel this:

The only thing stopping gcc from becoming the desired boringcc is to find the people willing to do the work.

(Because OSH has shopt --set strict:all, which is "boring bash". Not many people understand the corners well enough to disallow them - https://oils.pub/ )

---

And Proposal for a Friendly Dialect of C (2014)

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180

It is kind of ironic, given the existence of Orthodox C++, and kind of proves the point, that C isn't as simple as people think, having only read the K&R C book and nothing else.

> in the C "standard"

Oof, those passive-aggressive quotes were probably deserved at the time.

> C isn't not a high level assembler

Hmm.

The text following this heading seems to take the opposite view. I suspect this is a typo.

However, I think the heading is accurate as written. The "C is not a high level assembler" crowd, in my view, is making a category error, conflating C itself with an ISO standard and abstract machine concept coming decades later.

By the same token, "C is a high level assembler" is a gross oversimplification.

"C isn't not a high level assembler" indeed.

> The "C is not a high level assembler" crowd, in my view, is making a category error, conflating C itself with an ISO standard and abstract machine concept coming decades later.

"C isn't not a high level assembler" captures it almost perfectly, and it also captures the documented intent of the people who created the ANSI C standard, which was that ANSI C should not preclude the (common) use of C as a high-level assembly language.

Here the quote:

C code can be non-portable. Although it strove to give programmers the opportunity to write truly portable programs, the C89 Committee did not want to force programmers into writing portably, to preclude the use of C as a “high-level assembler”: the ability to write machine- specific code is one of the strengths of C. It is this principle which largely motivates drawing the distinction between strictly conforming program and conforming program (§4).

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/C99RationaleV5.1...

(bottom of page 2)

What would you say C is beyond the high-level assembler ? genuinely curious (i kinda hold that belief personally but i'm not a c programmer by trade)

I see a huge semantic gap between assembly language and C.

An assembly language program specifies a sequence of CPU instructions. The mapping between lines of code and generated instructions is one-to-one, or nearly so.

A C program specifies run-time behavior, without regard to what CPU instructions might be used to achieve that.

C is at a lower level than a lot of other languages, but it's not an assembly language.

And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Both ISA-level assembly and C are targeting an abstract machine model, even if the former is somewhat further removed from hardware reality.

Java also targets an abstract machine model (JVM) - such statement really doesn't mean much.

Assembly is not about corresponding to exactly which gates open when in the CPU. It's just the human writable form of whatever the CPU ingests, whereas C is an early take on a language reasonable capable of expressing higher level ideas with less low-level noise.

I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

Sure but from software POV assembly is the lowest level you can target

> And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

It's still much closer to the input machine code compared to what compiler optimizer passes do to your input C code ;)

> And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Nobody claimed that. It corresponds to the instructions the CPU runs and their observable order.

Also it's really only x86 that uses micro-ops (in the way that you mean), and there are still plenty of in-order CPUs.

Look at the compiler assembly output after optimization kicks in. The resulting assembly code is usually significantly different from the input source code. With modern optimizer passes, C is much closer to any other high level programming language than to handwritten assembly code.

C is a programming language. It makes for a very shitty high level assembler.

Here's a trivial example clang will often implement differently on different systems, producing two different results. Clang x64 will generally mul+add, while clang arm64 is aggressive about fma.

    x = 3.0f*x+1.0f;

But that's just the broad strategy. Depending on the actual compiler flags, the assembly generated might include anything up to multiple function calls under the hood (sanitizers, soft floats, function profiling, etc).

I don't think clang is being "aggressive" on ARM, it's just that all aarch64 targets support fma. You'll get similar results with vfmadd213ss on x86-64 with -march=haswell (13 years old at this point, probably a safe bet).

    float fma(float x) {
        return 3.0f * x + 1.0f;
    }

Clang armv8 21.1.0:

    fma(float):
        sub     sp, sp, #16
        str     s0, [sp, #12]
        ldr     s1, [sp, #12]
        fmov    s2, #1.00000000
        fmov    s0, #3.00000000
        fmadd   s0, s0, s1, s2
        add     sp, sp, #16
        ret

Clang x86-64 21.1.0:

    .LCPI0_0:
        .long   0x3f800000
    .LCPI0_1:
        .long   0x40400000
    fma(float):
        push    rbp
        mov     rbp, rsp
        vmovss  dword ptr [rbp - 4], xmm0
        vmovss  xmm1, dword ptr [rbp - 4]
        vmovss  xmm2, dword ptr [rip + .LCPI0_0]
        vmovss  xmm0, dword ptr [rip + .LCPI0_1]
        vfmadd213ss     xmm0, xmm1, xmm2
        pop     rbp
        ret

The point is that there are multiple, meaningfully different implementations for the same line, not that either is wrong. Sometimes compilers will even produce both implementations and call one or the other based on runtime checks, as this ICC example does:

https://godbolt.org/z/KnErdebM5

David is quite accomplished, but in this instance he is simply wrong. For two reasons:

1. All the reasons he cites that depend on "what the metal does" being different and quite a bit more complex than what is surfaced in C apply equally to machine/assembly language. So the CPU's instruction set is not a low-level language? Interesting take, but I don't think so: it is the lowest level language that is exposed by the CPU.

2. The other reasons boil down to "I would like to do this optimization", and that is simply inapplicable.

There are many problems with this website. I couldn't actually find the meat of it, where the intro page talked about what it could do for us.

Inconsistent titles, stuff labelled [TOC].

It might be a work in progress and not really ready to be shared widely.

Languages like C are simply very unforgiving to amateurs, and naive arbitrary code generators. Bad workmanship writes bad code in any language. Typically the "easier" the compiler is to use... the more complex the failure mode. =3

Vibe coders usually offer zero workmanship (especially with the web), and are enamored with statistically salient generated arbitrary content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

C is simply unforgiving, amateur or not.

Programming is unforgiving.

What are you actually answering to?

I agree, seems off topic but let’s be kind.

The basis of the cited 10 rules helped form many standards for reliable code:

https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

Best of luck =3

Reply to bypass a nonsense slop-article that doesn't actually offer any legitimate insights into workmanship standards.

Follow the 10 rules on the single wiki page, and C becomes a lot less challenging to stabilize. Could also look at why C and Assembly is still used where metastability considerations matter. If you spend your days in user-space Applications, than don't worry about it...

A bit of history where these rules came from, and why they matter. =3

"Why Fighter Jets Ban 90% of C++ Features"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv4sDL9Ljww

The idea is interesting but unfortunately the actual articles are riddled with spelling errors, typos, missing words, sentences that cut off before

And so on. Is this a work-in-progress thing not meant for public consumption yet?

Wow, lots of C related posts in the last few days. Is that because of vibecoders rediscovering it?

Or a lot of people are feeling threatened by Rust and trying to push more C.

The author of this website couldn't be further from any notion of vibe coding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHdvT-vjA0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM

Vibe coders follow the herd (Python, JS, Rust), they don't write any C.

Trolling for rage drives engagement. =3

This is reminiscent of Orthodox C++ [0], though I think it's perhaps more similar in goal than intent.

[0]: https://bkaradzic.github.io/posts/orthodoxc++/

what's the difference between goal and intent?

What I was thinking was something like the difference between "what" and "why". I probably could have worded that better...

A goal is what, intent is why. And a same goal could be motivated by different intents.

Is there a way to force reader mode or force text not to be justified like that? I'm having a difficult time reading the content (on mobile at least).

On an iPad I can't read the web page at all. The insert at the upper right overlies and obscures the main body of text.

It'd also be a good starting point to be more concrete in your ambitions. What version of C is your preferred starting point, the basis for your "Better C"?

I'd also suggest the name "Dependable C" confuses readers about your objective. You don't seek reliability but a return to C's simpler roots. All the more reason to choose a recognized historical version of C as your baseline and call it something like "Essential C".

Honestly as a hobbyist programmer I'm more interested in knowing which exact platforms/compilers that don't support the non-dependable patterns and why should I care about them. Even better if the author can host a list of "supported platforms" that's guaranteed to work if people's projects invest in the style.

This list of rules applies to most languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

A bit of history where these rules came from, and why they matter. =3

"Why Fighter Jets Ban 90% of C++ Features"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv4sDL9Ljww

From the author of "The Power of 10" (among other excellent writings):

"Mars Code - Gerard Holzmann, JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16dQLBgOwbE