Sometimes when I don’t leave comments like that, I get review comments asking what the line does. Code like ThisMethodInitsTheService() with comments like “what does this do?” in the review.
So now I comment a lot. Apparently reading code is hard for some people, even code that tells you exactly what it does in very simple terms.
I’m not going to say that C is unusable by any means (and I’m not saying you are saying that). It’s a perfectly usable language. I do think that more people would benefit from exploring other options though. Programming languages are tools, not sports teams. People should familiarize themselves with many tools so they always have a good tool to use for any job.
I think a lot of people believe this because there is some truth to parts of it. I think we see languages like Rust and Zig (and others) popping up to try and solve specific problems better than others.
As for OP’s post, there is no single “C successor” or anything like that. People will use the best tool they know of for the job whether that’s C, Rust, C++, Zig, Python, C#, etc. Many languages will “replace” C in some projects, and at the same time, C will replace other languages in some projects (likely to a lesser extent though).
(Not /s this time)
Honestly C is the future. I don’t know why people would move from C to any other language. It does the job well enough that there’s no reason not to use it.
Think about it. Every modern application depends on a piece of code written in C, not Rust or Zig or any other language (except assembly). It can be used to solve any problem, and works in more places than any other language.
These arguments about “security” and “memory safety” are all pointless anyway in the face of modern code scanning tools. Cross-platform dev can be done trivially with preprocessors. If that’s not enough, I don’t know what to say. Get better at writing C obviously.
Lifetimes and UB should all be kept in mind at all times. You can explicitly mark lifetimes in your C code if you want using comments. Any index-out-of-bounds bugs, use-after-free, etc are just signs that your team needs more training and better code scanning utils. Write more tests!
Anything more complex than a simple typedef is just a sign that you’re over-engineering your solution. is both simple, and does exactly what you’d expect any reasonable language to do - paste your referenced code inline. It’s genius, and doesn’t require any complicated explanations on namespaces and classes and subclasses and so on.
So which will be the future? C obviously.
/s
Reject assembly, return to machine code. Assembly is an inaccurate projection of what the machine truly does. Writing the binary by hand hardens us, and brings us closer to the computer. We better understand what our machine is doing when we calculate our jumps by hand.
The “‘modern’ development stack” we used at my school when I was in a CS program was C++98 or something, compiled using gcc directly. This was in the last decade. It technically wasn’t C!
But we did use C in my computer engineering classes so I guess they technically did teach it. I feel very fortunate that I haven’t needed to use it since then.
Pushing HTML even further, one could say it’s a declarative programming language that programs a UI in a mostly-stateless manner (inputs aren’t really stateless but you can argue the state is provided by the UI rather than managed by HTML).
I’m not sure I’d make this leap myself though, I have a hard time classifying it (or any other markup language) as a PL. As far as I am aware, you can’t really program a state machine with pure HTML, though you can accept inputs and return outputs at least.
I think it’s good to document why things are done, but extracting things out into another function is just documenting what is being done with extra steps. This also comes with a number of problems:
// or # would have made the code just as readable.If those functions are huge units of work or pretty complex, I can agree. For most cases though, a simple code comment should do to explain what’s going on?
While impressive, a minifier can bring it down to 1 line of JS! I do like that this can function as a reference for making simple canvas-based games though.
I also avoid query syntax generally because I find it hard to map to method syntax with more complex queries. It’s a cool concept though, despite it being painful to use.
For library code - yes, you’d usually want to direct users to the correct way of using the library, so you’d be more likely to come across fallible build functions or a bunch of type parameters to constrain when it can be called.
For applications - honestly, it’s your code, so do what makes sense to you. Using a build function can help you ensure your settings were fully configured before using them, but it’s up to you if that’s the direction that makes the most sense to you. One benefit is you only need to perform the check once, but the downside is having another “built” type that you need to keep in sync with the original type. You can also look at libraries like derive_builder if you want to have your builder generated for you to avoid needing to manually update two separate types.
C# also has a built-in query language (LINQ). I think it might just be simpler to group them together to avoid nuances like these, though I don’t think anyone would complain about not seeing LINQ on a query language list either.
I wonder how many people learned Lua for this reason (CC and friends).
Speaking as someone with a MTF close friend and NB spouse, but the term used in the article is the term everyone around me used when I was growing up. That term may be obsolete now, and if so, the author simply needs to be informed. There’s no need to assume they meant harm by it.
If they knowingly used a term that may offend, then that’s of course a separate issue.
In addition to 1:many, many:many, and many:1 (which is just 1:many but looking at it in the other direction), you also occasionally see 1:1, for example if you want to augment a table with additional data. This might be done by having your foreign key also be your primary key in the augmenting table, since that would also enforce a uniqueness constraint on the FK as a result.
Also, probably unnecessary to mention, but you can also have “0 or 1” relationship (meaning one side is optional but capped at 1). These are technically separated from “1” relationships usually when you get into all the theory. An example of this might be a “0:1” relationship using the above augment table, but where the augmenting table isn’t required to have a row for every row in the augmented table. (A 1:1 constraint can be enforced, for example, by having an additional FK in the augmented table pointing to the augmenting table.)
To add - blocking the main thread on a long running task in the browser can make the page unresponsive. There’s not really a way, as far as I know, to “block until a promise completes”, which might be the source of the frustration. It seems to me that was intentional by the ones who designed this function.
If they are mutually exclusive special cases, using an enum like another comment mentioned makes sense, and can limit the special cases to one field. You can use an enum of strings if you want it to be more readable.
As for how the data is represented, only including the special case field when there is one makes sense as well. Keep in mind JSON is also a flexible format - you can even have the array contain mixed types, like strings for simple licenses, and objects for more complex licenses. That can reduce the size of the JSON document quite a bit, if that’s an option.
If you want to use it in your start menu, there are some options. I know Start11 can use Everything, for example (but isn’t free - there may be free options out there, but I haven’t looked).
Otherwise, most of what I’ve seen are CLI applications. Is there anything specific about Windows you’re hoping to see a replacement for? For me, search and settings (why the f are you advertising to me in the f-ing settings?) are the worst offenders, but settings is kinda locked in for the most part unfortunately.
We have infused AI into every layer of Windows
I sure hope not. I don’t want Windows to just decide to delete my hard drive because it feels like it.
We are introducing Windows Semantic Index, a new OS capability which redefines search on Windows and powers new experiences like Recall.
You could also improve Windows search by contracting with voidtools and integrating Everything. While you’re at it, maybe ditch the bing searches, and other useless search results?
Anyway, the rest of the article seems to go into actual dev-oriented details, and there’s some interesting bits like enabling certain AI acceleration features on the web (probably only in Edge though…), for what that’s worth.
If you’re hoping for the standard lib to have things built on evolving standards and ecosystems like HTTP clients, then I doubt that will ever happen. There are plenty of examples of why that would be a terrible idea (
urllib,std::regex, etc).