don’t defer
There is a proposal to add “defer” to C. Its biggest example is taken from code that was originally designed to not manage storage at all, but to run once and exit – delegating all the cleanup to exit. The
Unforgivable C programming 1
As many people never tire of explaining, the C language is obsolete, unsafe, unwelcome in polite company and generally looked down on by thought leaders and adepts of λ calculus alike. Here’s a program that exhibits the lamentably low level
Threads in C
There is a nice example thread semantics in a paper by David Goldblatt (P1916R0) which illustrates a couple of things about multi-core processing – including how interesting it is and how poorly defined the C11 atomic/thread extension is . A
PLOS 2021 paper: How ISO-C became unusable for operating system development
Memory model and semantics for C
A perceptive note from Linus Torvalds about the C/C++ “memory model” is reproduced below. From Linus Torvalds <> Date Thu, 7 Jun 2018 08:40:49 -0700 Subject Re: LKMM litmus test for Roman Penyaev’s rcu-rr share 0 On Thu, Jun 7,
unfashionable C
In computer science academia, C along with UNIX, and PDP11s, is as unfashionable as can be: the equivalent of other 1970’s relics, like polyester leisure suits and mullets. In 2018 ACM Queue published an essay by David Chisnall called: C
Undefined behavior in C is a reading error.
Considering how important “undefined behavior” has become to C semantics and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 Committee, the lack of any reference to it in the K&R ANSI book is notable and the description in the 1999 C Rationale was quite modest.
C is not a serious programming language
The C Standards process over the last few decades has addressed both optimization and pointer type safety largely through a concept called “undefined behavior”. The idea is that instead of positive rules for what compilers and programmers can do, the
Dennis Ritchie on alias analysis in the C programming language 1988
This 1998 note by Dennis Ritchie from comp.lang.c (and also here ) is very current since the concept of noalias has definitely crept back into the standard. I have reproduced it verbatim, but lightly formatted for readability. For further reading