The Pain and Glory of C

I don't normally write much C code, but this past week I was fiddling around with it this past week to solve some programming puzzles. When I say C I mean straight C (without the ++ or #). Completely un-object-oriented; just structures, helper functions and malloc/free. It took me 3 days (a total of probably 9 hours) to write a fully functional 250-300 SLOC solution to a puzzle (complete with huge memory leaks). This all brings me to the burning question - who would ever want to write programs in C?

C++ has developed over the years. I recently looked at some of the enhancements in C++11 which include the auto keyword (like var in C#), better reference counting "smart pointers", lambdas and closures. Obviously, C++ is developing and progressing. C hasn't had a spec change since 1999, and even then it wasn't exactly dramatic. We still don't have any OO or reference counting pointers.

Have you ever tried interfacing with a library in C? It's very cumbersome. You have to read all the documentation and call the right my_library_object_*() functions at the right times. Everything is hands-on, nothing is left to imagination. You have to remember what memory you allocated so you can free it sometime later when you're sure you don't need it anymore (and then recursively free sub-structures and arrays).

I think anyone can see warts in C. But its easy to forget the simplistic beauty. I mean, there aren't many operators in C, and there's only one way to cast. I mean, sure, you still can't create & initialize a counter variable inline in a for-loop. But the complex syntax of C++ is scary in comparison with all it's member::accessors, template, 5-6 ways to cast a variable and a slew of gotchas. Sure, C has it's share of gotchas, but the language is so small that anyone who's spent any significant time programming C can list most of them out for you (probably not so true with C++).

So why not C#? Well, it's freaking slow!! Think about when people were converting their business apps from VB6 to C#. Sure the maintainability of the code improved by leaps and bounds, but almost everyone noticed the performance difference and wondered how the same program could be so slow.

Recently Microsoft unveiled some information to developers about the upcoming Windows 8 release and it's metro interface. One of the biggest surprises to developers is how hard Microsoft is trying to sell C/C++ and how C#/.NET is falling by the wayside. The driving factor is that Apple has snappy user interfaces and Windows Forms are known for being slow and boring. So Microsoft created a new WinRT UI toolkit for Windows 8 that intends to never block the UI thread. Operations that take longer than ~50ms should use Async code so that the UI can continue to feel responsive. (This sounds eerily similar to Node.JS but with a lot more code).

Obviously Microsoft wants developers to develop faster apps by going back to C/C++, maybe we should consider taking them seriously. But I think the more likely direction is development being done primarily in one of the common dynamic languages like Ruby/Python/Node.JS with certain code that needs speedup written as C modules. All of those general purpose scripting languages are written in C (not C++) and interface very well with C. I've seen lots of math-intensive Python libraries being composed partly of C code (some with increasing portions written in C). I could also see the popularity of Node.JS increase if it was applied to more than web/networking apps but also non-blocking UI. (After all, this is basically what WinRT is).

I don't know about you, but I'm going to be spending some time tuning up my C/C++ skills. History has been known to repeat, and I think it is now repeating yet again.