dsimcha Wrote: > == Quote from Sean Kelly ([email protected])'s article > > BCS Wrote: > > > > > > I guess my point is that aside from VERY resource limited systems, almost > > > no one will have C as their first choice. Even with those limited systems > > > I'd bet that most people would rather be working in something else if they > > > could. That said, there are many places where it ends up being the lingua > > > franca. > > C has the advantage of working pretty much the same on every platform > > around, > while C++ compilers are /still/ unreliable about standard library support, > language features, etc. In fact, my current project is in C, though I'd > prefer at > least using the "C with objects" style of C++ like DMD is written in. As > you've > said, C is the lingua franca in many places and it's difficult to displace. > > C is such an unbelievably low level language that I find it amazing that > anyone > would use it outside of kernels, device drivers, very resource-limited > embedded > systems and legacy systems where the decision was made a long time ago. I > would > think the portability issues of C++ would be easier to deal with than the > extreme > low levelness of C.
In my case it's really mostly entrenchment. I could have pushed for C++, but I'd have been the only one on the team who'd spent much time with the language so there'd have been little point. As it is, I find myself lamenting the "pointers are arrays" issue every single day. I've ended up writing a whole slew of memxxx() routines the standard library left out just so I could do string manipulation without inserting and removing null terminators for each operation.
