On 20/5/25 22:43, Nico Williams wrote:
[snip]
What you want is for C to have a type attribute that denotes
immutability all the way down. `const` doesn't do that. One thing that
could be done is to write a utility that creates const-all-the-way-down
clones of given types, but such a tool can't be written as C
pre-processor macros -- it would have to be a tool that parses the
actual type definitions, or uses DWARF or similar to from the
compilation of a file (I've done this latter before, but this weds you
to compilers that output DWARF, which MSVC doesn't, for example).
Really, the C committee ought to add this at some point, darn it. It
would be the opposite of Rust's &mut.
Like C++'s const specifier, specially const references to objects? This
is actually natively compatible with C code, "just" by throwing extern
"C" around.....
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/cv
(most of Postgres' code is already "Object-oriented in C" in my view...)
The fact that the C++ compiler is usually able to optimize deeper/better
than a C one due to aggresive inlining+global optimization and inferred
"strict"ness doesn't hurt either :)
My €.02. HTH.
/ J.L.
--
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time alloted to it.
