this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Programming
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I would argue that because C is so hard to program in, even the claim to machine efficiency is arguable. Yes, if you have infinite time for implementation, then C is among the most efficient, but then the same applies to C++, Rust and Zig too, because with infinite time any artificial hurdle can be cleared by the programmer.
In practice however, programmers have limited time. That means they need to use the tools of the language to save themselves time. Languages with higher levels of abstraction make it easier, not harder, to reach high performance, assuming the abstractions don’t provide too much overhead. C++, Rust and Zig all apply in this domain.
An example is the situation where you need a hash map or B-Tree map to implement efficient lookups. The languages with higher abstraction give you reusable, high performance options. The C programmer will need to either roll his own, which may not be an option if time Is limited, or choose a lower-performance alternative.
I understand your point but come on, basic stuff has been implemented in a thousand libraries. There you go, a macro implementation
And how testable is that solution? Sure macros are helpful but testing and debugging them is a mess
You mean whether the library itself is testable? I have no idea, I didn't write it, it's stable and out there for years.
Whether the program is testable? Why wouldn't it be. I could debug it just fine. Of course it's not as easy as Go or Python but let's not pretend it's some arcane dark art
Yes I mean mocking, faking, et. al. Not this particular library but macros in general
I’m not saying you can’t, but it’s a lot more work to use such solutions, to say nothing about their quality compared to std solutions in other languages.
And it’s also just one example. If we bring multi-threading into it, we’re opening another can of worms where C doesn’t particularly shine.
Not sure I understand your comment on multithreading. pthreads are not very hard to use, and you have stuff like OpenMP if you want some abstraction. What about C is not ideal for multithreading?
It’s that the compiler doesn’t help you with preventing race conditions. This makes some problems so hard to solve in C that C programmers simply stay away from attempting it, because they fear the complexity involved.
It’s a variation of the same theme: Maybe a C programmer could do it too, given infinite time and skill. But in practice it’s often not feasible.
Memory management, but that impacts stability/security instead of performance.
What are you talking about? https://docs.gtk.org/glib/data-structures.html
Well, let’s be real: many C programs don’t want to rely on Glib, and licensing (as the other reply mentioned) is only one reason. Glib is not exactly known for high performance, and is significantly slower than the alternatives supported by the other languages I mentioned.
OK, think of all the other C collection libraries there must be out there!
Which one should I pick then, that is both as fast as the std solutions in the other languages and as reusable for arbitrary use cases?
Because it sounds like your initial pick made you loose the machine efficiency argument and you can’t have it both ways.
Glib us licensed under LGPL. So unless your project is happy with that, it's as if it didn't exist. That's one of the problems of having a small standard library.
It's one of the more permissive licenses - who the hell is going to have a problem with lgpl? You can ship it with proprietary applications.
It’s a single counterexample. there are many, many such libraries for C and the programmer does not have to roll their own.