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

On 24/03/2025 15:00, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

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

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

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.
>
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.

 I'm not sure what kind of build time he's looking for either. On this Mac
ARM laptop I can compile a 7600 line utility I wrote in C in 0.8 seconds
real time, and that is using a makefile with 18 seperate source files and
a header and includes link time. So unless he's rebuilding the linux kernel
every day I don't see what the problem is.
 loki$ ls *.c *.h | wc -l
       19
loki$ wc -l *.c *.h
:
:
      691 globals.h
     7602 total
loki$ time make
:
:
real 0m0.815s
user 0m0.516s
sys 0m0.252s

So, your throughput is a whopping 9.5K lines/second?
Here's a project I'm working at the minute (not in C):
   c:\bx>tim mm bb
   Compiling bb.m to bb.exe
   Time: 0.066
Build time is 1/15th of a second, for about 30K lines (so 450Klps). But I also want to compile this via C, to take advantage of gcc's superior optimiser. So first I transpile to C (that's also under 70ms):
   c:\bx>mc -c bb
   Compiling bb.m to bb.c
Now I can invoke gcc:
   c:\bx>tim gcc -O3 -s bb.c -o dd
   Time: 12.316
The generated C file is 38Kloc, and takes 12 seconds. It takes nearly TWO HUNDRED TIMES longer to build.
I can tolerate that from time to time,
Using gcc-O0 takes only two seconds, but since it's generating slower code than mine, there is no point:
            Build time        Run time
bcc bb       70 ms            628 ms
gcc -O0    2000 ms           1517 ms
gcc -O3   12300 ms            579 ms
(On this test, gcc-O3 was 8% faster, but in depends on the input to this interpreter project. On average it is 25% faster.)