Re: C23 thoughts and opinions

On 26/05/2024 12:09, David Brown wrote:

On 26/05/2024 00:58, Keith Thompson wrote:

For a very large file, that could be a significant burden.  (I don't
have any numbers on that.)

 I do :
 <https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3017.htm#design-efficiency-metrics>
 (That's from a proposal for #embed for C and C++.  Generating the numbers and parsing them is akin to using xxd.)
 More useful links:
 <https://thephd.dev/embed-the-details#results>
<https://thephd.dev/implementing-embed-c-and-c++>
 (These are from someone who did a lot of the work for the proposals, and prototype implementations, as far as I understand it.)
   Note that I can't say how much of a difference this will make in real life.  I don't know how often people need to include multi-megabyte files in their code.  It certainly is not at a level where I would change any of my existing projects from external generator scripts to using #embed, but I might use it in future projects.

I've just done my own quick test (not in C, using embed in my language):
     []byte clangexe = binclude("f:/llvm/bin/clang.exe")
     proc main=
         fprintln "clang.exe is # bytes", clangexe.len
     end
This embeds the Clang C compiler which is 119MB. It took 1.3 seconds to compile (note my compiler is not optimised).
If I tried it using text: a 121M-line include file, with one number per line, it took 144 seconds (I believe it used more RAM than was available: each line will have occupied a 64-byte AST node, so nearly 8GB, on a machine with only 6GB available RAM, much of which was occupied).
The figures at your link say it took 1 second for a 40MB test file, on an Intel i7 with 24GB.
My compiler took just over 1.3 seconds (now annoyingly taking 1.4 seconds for a retest) for a file nearly 3 times bigger, on a much more lowly machine (second cheapest PC in the shop), with 8GB.
So my implementation sounds faster. Of course, those 120M data bytes haven't been optimised!
As for usage, this would be a tidy way of bundling a program like a C compiler if your program required it, although there are a number of alternatives in that case: the binary here doesn't need to exist in the application's data space.