What I like and dislike about C - my thoughts on a language that has been more resilient (in terms of sticking around and being used) than probably any other:

https://www.phpdeveloper.org.uk/what-i-like-and-dislike-about-c/

#c

I have seen this advice on struct padding in C a few times - especially ordering fields from largest to smallest.

Is there any reason why the compiler doesn't do this for you? Presumably it knows the size at compile time, because sizeof can be applied to both the fields and the struct?

Or is the compiler avoiding this because you might be assuming a certain memory layout?

https://tomscheers.github.io/2025/07/29/writing-memory-efficient-structs-post.html

#c #optimisation

I am so stuck in making this C/OpenBSD based website.

It's funny how much work it is to do things that are like trivial in
Flask/PHP/Django etc.

But I don't mind at all. I'm pretty confident I could run this on
any low level hardware. Like I keep wanting a 486 or pentium 1
and it would probably run just fine. I guess the https might be
the real expensive part :)

Anywho, I added email sending:
https://alive.d34d.net/emailtest/

Again you won't see anything, it sends it to me.
I am afraid to put an email form on a public page that did
anything more than email me.

If you notice I put ?r=12312312-123123 url params on all of
links that would have dynamic content. That is because I am using
#links2 to an it will otherwise cache the pages.

#OpenBSD #C #links2

Just to give you an idea of how much software GCC 14's default of -Werror=implicit-function-declaration breaks, here are two pkgsrc bulk build results:

GCC 13.3.0: 24835/28450
GCC 14.3.0: 2589/28450

https://reports.pkgci.org/SmartOS/upstream/trunk/20250630.2248/meta/report.html

https://reports.pkgci.org/SmartOS/upstream/trunk/20250701.2248/meta/report.html

I also had to fix up a bunch of things before the build would even start.

This could take a while. And then the fun starts all over again with GCC 15's changes...

#pkgsrc #c

I am building gcc-15.1.0 on my iMac G4 (Tiger) machine. It is on stage2, which is a good sign.

It will include C, C++, Fortran, Modula-2, Objective C, and Objective C++ compilers.

It will depend on my new PowerPC Mac OS X modernization library, libpcc: https://github.com/ibara/libppc

I'll write a blog post about how to use it once it is all compiled; my goal is to produce a turnkey solution that just works(TM), including assembler, linker, and other utilities, as recent as possible for PowerPC.

And libppc can be instantly extendable to incorporate more C11 and later features. Hopefully others in the retro Mac community are interested in building that up with me.

My ultimate goal is to build some flavor of WebKit some day and have a modern web experience (even if slow, and possibly using X11). But in the meantime we will probably build a lot of excellent modern software to keep these machines going.

#gcc #compiler #compilers #c #unix #linux #macos #macosx #osx #apple #powerpc #retro #retrocomputing #bsd #mac #macintosh

@iris_meredith to write the same piece of functionality in #C as in #Lisp, you'll use exactly the same number of bracket ({[]}) characters; plus in C you will additionally have to use many other punctuation characters that you wouldn't have to use in Lisp. You will also, typically, have to write many more lines of actual code.

But of course Lisp syntax is much more complex.

I'd boost it (the blog is federated - @ltning), but @writefreely doesn't render nicely for some reason.
#Fail #DOS #C #Retrocomputing

(Also @obsoletemediauk - got any new updates lately? :)