Skip to content

keeping simple

@vy@mastodon.social

Category: programming languages

C Standards: the triumph of bureaucracy

September 1, 2026 vy c programming, C standard, programming languages

Draft standards C89  The ANSI standard. C23 the most recent draft. Notes and quotes on C standard. Three modest proposals for fixing the C standard. 

Read more

Kuth’s Merge Sort in C

January 24, 2024 vy c programming

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

Read more

don’t defer

December 4, 2023 vy C standard

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

Read more

Unforgivable C programming 1

September 11, 2022 vy c programming

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

Read more

Threads in C

March 26, 2022 vy C standard

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

Read more

PLOS 2021 paper: How ISO-C became unusable for operating system development

October 6, 2021 vy C standard, operating systems
Read more

Memory model and semantics for C

August 3, 2021 vy C standard

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

Read more

unfashionable C

May 21, 2021 vy C standard, computer architecture, programming languages

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

Read more

Undefined behavior in C is a reading error.

May 19, 2021 vy C standard

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

Read more

ISO C is not a serious programming language

May 16, 2021 vy C standard, programming languages, software security

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

Read more

Posts pagination

1 2 3 Next Posts»
WordPress Theme: Gridbox by ThemeZee.