Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?

On 24/03/2025 23:25, James Kuyper wrote:

On 23/03/2025 02:34, bart wrote:
 

It's strange: in one part of the computing world, the speed of building
software is a very big deal. All sorts of efforts are going on to deal
with it. Compilation speed for developers is always an issue. There is a
general movement away from LLVM-based backends /because/ it is so slow.
>
And yet in another part (namely comp.lang.c) it appears to be a total
non-issue!

 Throughout my career, far less time was spent compiling my programs than
was spent executing them.

Whose time, yours, or the people that ran your programs?
(I had 100s of customers some of whom were running my programs all day. One of my programs was run daily for 23 years.)
  The overwhelming majority of the code I wrote

was executed 24/7 on at least one machine, and usually hundreds, for
several months at a time, for each version delivered.

I don't think I mentioned execution time. My remarks are about the developer experience. Yes, if you're going to make a production version or a long-running program, then it is worthwile optimising it to the hilt.
I just find compile times of even seconds annoying: imagine if you clicked on something (after clicking 100 buttons with instant response) and nothing happens ... maybe it turns out to be 7 seconds, or 17, but you don't know that while waiting, as no progress bar is shown.
It's a very frustrating delay that breaks your concentration and destroys fluency.
(There used to be a bug in Thunderbird where it would hang for seconds at a time while you were typing, and you had to pause until it caught up. Don't tell me you wouldn't find it annoying because it's only a 'few seconds'.
You don't expect just 'typing' to take a lot of computation, and I don't expect a simple translation which I know can be done in T time, to take one to two magnitudes longer.)

A single delivery
might involve development and testing that might require a few dozen
compilations. Thanks to effective use of makefiles, most compilations
were of only a few modules at a time,

I used to do that without makefiles! If you've been working on a project for a year, then you know exactly what the dependencies are. And when I did have to compile everything, it [my IDE that invoked the compiler] would show what it was up to. Not that it took that long anyway, as it zoomed through the displayed list of files.
I considered it part of my job to get a workable edit-build-run cycle on any project.