C89 C23 Three modest proposals for fixing the C standard.
C Standards
C23 standard (final draft)
Kuth’s Merge Sort in C
Taken from Knuth Algorithm S mergesort P162-163 Vol 3 Second edition 1998 The major change is that the scratch buffer is not required to be adjacent and there are some changes because C array indexing starts with 0. This is
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
Here’s a program that exhibits the low level nature of C by changing the return address of a function. The function “one” always returns the number 1 and the function “two” always returns the number 2. The main code calls
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.