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

On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:32:32 +0100
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 24/03/2025 15:07, bart wrote:

On 24/03/2025 11:51, David Brown 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!
 

>
You find it strange that different parts of the computing world
(or, more appropriately, software development world) have
different priorities, needs and focuses for their tools?  I find
it very strange that anyone would find that strange!
>
 

 
What was strange was that that one view was shared by pretty much
everyone in comp.lang.c. 

 
Do you know what the people in comp.lang.c have in common?
 
We program in C.
 
Do you know /why/ people program in C?
 
There can be many reasons, but a very common one is that they want
fast resulting binaries.  Most serious programmers are familiar with
more than one language, and pretty much all other languages are
higher level, easier, and have higher developer productivity than C -
but the resulting binaries are almost always slower.
 

I disagree.
35-36 years ago I forgot about Pascal after few months of exposure to C.
It didn't happen because of speed of resulting binaries, but due to my
own improved productivity.
Ada and Rust are two other exampled of languages that lag behinds C in
productivity.
And in all three cases above I still did not leave the realm of
relatively good languages. Unfortunately, I have to use at least one
bad language as well - tcl.

Besides, you forgot the main reason people program in C - often they
have no other choice.

C programmers are typically not bothered about build times because a)
their build times are rarely high (Scott's projects are C++), and b),
they are willing to sacrifice high build times if it means more
efficient run times.
 

More important reason is similar to one mentioned above - they have no
other choice. Neither of language nor of compiler.