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Hacktical C: practical hacker's guide to the C programming language

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218 points signa11 | 8 comments | 14 Apr 25 10:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 13:43 UTC] No.43681194[source]▶
> The reason I believe C is and always will be important is that it stands in a class of its own as a mostly portable assembler language, offering similar levels of freedom.

When your computer is a PDP-11, otherwise it is a high level systems language like any other.

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grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:17 UTC] No.43682246[source]▶
Which other popular language more accurately represents a random access machine of fixed word length?
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alexvitkov ◴[14 Apr 25 15:22 UTC] No.43682309[source]▶
None, but that'a not what computers are. C assumes that in a few places, e.g. variadic functions, and those are the worst parts of the language.
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1. grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:23 UTC] No.43682322[source]▶
> but that'a not what computers are

Which language more accurately represents hardware then?

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2. pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 15:35 UTC] No.43682466[source]▶
Assembly language from the hardware vendor.
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3. alexvitkov ◴[14 Apr 25 15:36 UTC] No.43682491[source]▶
C++ for one - it has atomics with well defined memory barriers, and guarentees for what happens around them.

The real answer is obviously Assembly - pick a random instruction from any random modern CPU and I'd wager there's a 95% chance it's something you can't express in C at all. If the goal is to model hardware (it's not), it's doing a terrible job.

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4. oguz-ismail ◴[14 Apr 25 15:40 UTC] No.43682533[source]▶
isn't it translated to microcode before being executed?
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5. sugrado ◴[14 Apr 25 15:49 UTC] No.43682638[source]▶
bro just quoted a chatbot
6. grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:49 UTC] No.43682642[source]▶
C++ better represents the machine?
7. pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 16:22 UTC] No.43682997{3}[source]▶
Depends on the hardware design.
8. uecker ◴[14 Apr 25 16:34 UTC] No.43683141[source]▶
C has the same atomics and concurrency model as C++.