Just looking for some opinions on the next standard. What do you guys think of #embed and constexpr? Will you be using C23 or sticking to an older standard like C99 or C89?
Just looking for some opinions on the next standard. What do you guys think of #embed and constexpr? Will you be using C23 or sticking to an older standard like C99 or C89?
I don’t think so on the extensibility aspect alone, some of the Rust syntax/trait does not map well to other languages when other languages attempts to extend Rust library. I write C code in a way that it would be extensible from any languages.
Sure, but I think it’s rather shows the shortcomings of C IMO, I could write C like Rust (
no_mangleeverywhere), and achieve the same, but than I would miss out a lot of the nice features of Rust that are missing in C (among one is better automatic compiler optimizations (e.g. vectorization, better byte-packing of structs etc. not even starting with all the functional features). I don’t think it’s really an issue, you can get fancy within the Rust crate, and build a C compatible interface on top, that are just wrapper functions, and you likely think more about the API/interface to other languages which is probably not a bad thing, while having an idiomatic API for other Rust crates.But I agree, that it works better to just stay in the ecosystem of Rust (you can provide a nicer API/interface for your crate with generics/traits etc.).
Anyway I don’t completely get what you mean with “extensible from any languages”?
It just rooted back to my frustration when I was trying to fill in missing implementation details on projects like Skia (at the time it lacked support for Vulkan.) My very fundamental core belief is that for core libraries like say, Skia, Neural Net Framework, and other crucial projects like that should offer a way in C API that allows every type and implementation to be extended upon by any other language that can interface with C API by providing your own VTable or whatnot.
One of the approach I do for my GUI Toolkit written in C (specifically on Linux to replace QT and GTK) was making a single inheritance object oriented programming in C.and if you insert the base class type structure at the top of your custom struct type and provide your own VTable for those objects, you can readily extend the underlying library natively in whatever programming language you use assuming it can talks to C API in a complete sense.
Let me know if you want a demonstration of this, I would be happy to find the time to set up a small sample to give you the idea on how it’s done.
And I am also aware of the criticisms on those approach, verbosity of attempting to implement object oriented programming in C is kind of absurd and the API coverage would balloon. That is largely why I work on a Compiler-Generator Framework specifically to address the challenges by allowing me to add dialects on top of C Language such as generic, object oriented programming, and various dialects. I brought C closer to C# in term of syntax and features and at the end of compilation, it still produces readable C language code output and it also generates what I called an FFI-JSON. It’s essentially a JSON file that describes all of the types used in a C project, the sizes of integers/floating points, structure types and it’s fields/offsets/sizes comments, and function declarations. It’s done in a way that you could read the JSON file and generate your programming language binding library saving you weeks of work.
Well IMHO OOP or specifically inheritance in general is absurd (hard take I know, I have had my traumatic experiences with inheritance hierarchies and refactoring/maintaining them - hell…).
I have done that (vtable OOP emulation in C) in my early years as CS student (like hmm I think 10 years ago?). It was fun experimenting with it, but ultimately I think C should be done imperative/procedural and modular composition of functions, and as such expose an API that is based on that.
Funny, I’m currently contributing to something similar in Rust :). Recently it also came up how to achieve cross-language bindings, Raph did prototyping for python a year ago in https://github.com/linebender/druid/tree/idiopath_py
I don’t think I would go an inheritance based route for a GUI toolkit/framework. Inheritance was IMHO generally a mistake in programming paradigms (at least this strong integration/promotion in most modern languages), too strong interconnected dependencies where they don’t make sense and constantly shoot you in the feet.
I think in times where React, Flutter, Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI etc. dominate (IMHO for a good reason), I would go into the direction of composable and declarative reactive UI. Make widgets strongly configurable on a fine-grained basis, and offer high-level bindings, but don’t offer more. In case that is an issue, I’d extend the core or maybe offer a way to natively extend the toolkit (e.g. because of performance, better integration/architecture/maintainability etc.)).