Comments on: Quick and Dirty Dynamic Arrays in C

By: deepak

deepak — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:17:48 +0000

try dyanamic array in C99.
okay!!!!
its nicely working and nice to use as well………

By: BarÄ±ÅŸcan YeÅŸilÃ§iÃ§ek

BarÄ±ÅŸcan YeÅŸilÃ§iÃ§ek — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 08:42:17 +0000

Hi,
I just want to say, C doesn’t supports inline variable declaration in a “For Loop” declaration. So, if you want it to be pure C; you should change line “for (int i = 0; i

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 23:06:37 +0000

Function call overhead makes a difference in places close to the metal, like
operating systems and device drivers. These are the most practical of projects,
not academic at all. (Academics would shy from C wherever possible, just
because the development time is high compared to a more expressive language.
But for some areas of research, like OSes, you have to use C.)

The latest version of Office is written mainly in C#, and even a popular program
like BitTorrent is written in Python. So I don’t see any place for C++ on a PC any longer.

Are embedded devices a good place for C++? Maybe, as they simulate what
computing was like in 1992 – 1998 or so. But this seems like a temporary
situation; you’d expect more development to move to higher-order application
languages as CPUs grow in power, just like what happened on the PC.

Indeed, more and more cell phone dev is moving to Java/BREW. I heard that
TiVo had some kind of Java-based toolkit (though I don’t know what ever happened
to it). It seems reasonable to assume that other consumer devices will follow suit, if they
haven’t already.

C++ was OK while it lasted, but it was essentially transitional. I don’t think anyone
would pick it if there are the resources to run Java or C#.

By: amd

amd — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 22:28:25 +0000

There is a very small penalty for using class functions in C++. If you actually care about that overhead, you’re probably working on one of the “esoteric projects” to which I refer. I imagine this sort of project is more common in academia.

If you’re shipping a product for consumers or businesses, this won’t matter to you. I’ve worked on “performance sensitive” code on a variety of embedded devices with small CPUs (details omitted) and I can definitively say that it’s not function call overhead that impacts performance.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 22:24:50 +0000

Adam,

I couldn’t disagree more with this part of your blog post:

C is an obsolete language and there’s really no good reason to use
it. For all but the most esoteric projects, C++ should be used instead
of C. I may elaborate on this theme in a future post.

I think it’s just the opposite. If you actually care about performance
or are close to the hardware, C is an obvious choice. The set of people
who should use C is smaller than it used to be, but for some areas there
is no substitute. (C++’s function call overhead and baffling compiler
make it unsuitable for really performance-sensitive stuff.)

On the other hand, if you’re doing application programming, there are
lots of good substitutes to C++ like Java and C#. (C shouldn’t even be
an option.) Python might also be an option. These languages offer lots
of features absent in C++, while eliminating a lot of stuff most C++
programmers don’t need. True, they’re probably slower, but who cares?

C++ occupies a place in the performance/expressiveness spectrum that’s
obsolete. I can’t think of a project today where I’d choose C++.

–Mike!