C Programming Language

C is one of the top languages in terms of speed, memory and energy

https://www.threads.com/@engineerscodex/post/C9_R-uhvGbv?hl=en

The author replaced a garbage collector with another for Guile, a Scheme dialect, both gcs are written in C

For the big brain 10,000 meter view, defer ⸺ and the forthcoming TS 25755 ⸺ is a general-purpose block/scope-based “undo” mechanism that allows you to ensure that no matter what happens a set of behavior (statements) are run.

There's no perhaps about the FBI and CISA getting snippy at buffer overflows. These people worry about exploits that threaten car-crash incidents in enterprise IT, and they've seen enough to get angry. It's not that making mistakes is a crime when writing code. No human endeavor worth doing is without error. It's more that this class of bug is avoidable, and has been for decades, yet it pours out of big tech like woodworm from a church pew. Enough already, they say. They are right.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22432836

I created a little side project over the past few days, a new build system for C and C++: https://github.com/blueOkiris/acbs/

I've seen a lot of discourse over C build tools. None of them really seem solid except for (some) Makefiles (some Makefiles are atrocious; you just can't rely on people these days). Bazel, cmake - they're just not straight forward like a clean Makefile is, basically black magic, but setting up a Makefile from scratch is a skill. Many copy the same one over each time. Wouldn't it be nice if that Makefile didn't even need to be copied over?

Building C should be straight forward. Grab the C files and headers I want, set some flags, include some libraries, build, link. Instead project build systems are way way way overcomplicated! Like have you ever tried building any of Google's C projects? Nearly impossible to figure out and integrate with projects.

So I've designed a simplistic build system for C (also C++) that is basically set up to work like a normal Makefile with gcc but where you don't have to set it up each time. The only thing you are required to provide is the name of the binary (although you can override defaults for your project, and yes, not just binaries are possible but libs as well). It also includes things like delta building without needing to configure.

Now there is one thing I haven't added yet - parallel building. It should be as simple as adding separate threads when building files (right now it's a for loop). I know that's something a lot of people will care about, but it's not there yet. It's also really intended to only work with Linux rn, but it could probably pretty easily be adjusted to work with Windows.

Lay your project out like the minimal example, adjust the project layout, and get building! The project itself is actually bootstrapped and built using whatever the latest release is, so it's its own example haha.

It's dead simple and obvious to the point I would claim that if your project can't work with this, your project is wrong and grossly over-complicated in its design, and you should rework the build system. C is simple, and so should the build system you use with it!

So yeah. Check it out when y'all get a chance

Book Description

Writing a C Compiler will take you step by step through the process of building your own compiler for a significant subset of C—no prior experience with compiler construction or assembly code needed. Once you’ve built a working compiler for the simplest C program, you’ll add new features chapter by chapter. The algorithms in the book are all in pseudocode, so you can implement your compiler in whatever language you like. Along the way, you’ll explore key concepts like:

• Lexing and parsing: Learn how to write a lexer and recursive descent parser that transform C code into an abstract syntax tree.
• Program analysis: Discover how to analyze a program to understand its behavior and detect errors.
• Code generation: Learn how to translate C language constructs like arithmetic operations, function calls, and control-flow statements into x64 assembly code.
• Optimization techniques: Improve performance with methods like constant folding, dead store elimination, and register allocation.

Compilers aren’t terrifying beasts—and with help from this hands-on, accessible guide, you might even turn them into your friends for life.

Author Bio

Nora Sandler is a software engineer based in Seattle. She holds a BS in computer science from the University of Chicago, where she researched the implementation of parallel programming languages. More recently, she’s worked on domain-specific languages at an endpoint security company. You can find her blog on pranks, compilers, and other computer science topics at https://norasandler.com/.

So I'm making this program in SDL to just render a single window and it's not working IDK why. It compiles well no errors or anything and then when I try to run it nothing happens at all. No text appears nor a window. I tried to run my own code but it didn't work so I went to try and run the code off the website and that didn't work either.

CODE:

/This source code copyrighted by Lazy Foo' Productions 2004-2024 and may not be redistributed without written permission./

//Using SDL and standard IO #include <SDL.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdbool.h>

//Screen dimension constants const int SCREEN_WIDTH = 640; const int SCREEN_HEIGHT = 480;

int main( int argc, char* args[] ) { //The window we'll be rendering to SDL_Window* window = NULL;

//The surface contained by the window
SDL_Surface* screenSurface = NULL;

//Initialize SDL
if( SDL_Init( SDL_INIT_VIDEO ) < 0 )
{
	printf( "SDL could not initialize! SDL_Error: %s\n", SDL_GetError() );
}
else
{
	//Create window
	window = SDL_CreateWindow( "SDL Tutorial", SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT, SDL_WINDOW_SHOWN );
	if( window == NULL )
	{
		printf( "Window could not be created! SDL_Error: %s\n", SDL_GetError() );
	}
	else
	{
		//Get window surface
		screenSurface = SDL_GetWindowSurface( window );

		//Fill the surface white
		SDL_FillRect( screenSurface, NULL, SDL_MapRGB( screenSurface->format, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF ) );
		
		//Update the surface
		SDL_UpdateWindowSurface( window );
        
        //Hack to get window to stay up
        SDL_Event e; bool quit = false; while( quit == false ){ while( SDL_PollEvent( &e ) ){ if( e.type == SDL_QUIT ) quit = true; } }
	}
}

//Destroy window
SDL_DestroyWindow( window );

//Quit SDL subsystems
SDL_Quit();

return 0;

}