Hacker News with Generative AI: C

Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C (educatedguesswork.org)
I've been writing a lot of Rust recently, and as anyone who has learned Rust can tell you, a huge part of the process of learning Rust is learning to work within its restrictive memory model, which forbids many operations that would be perfectly legal in either a systems programming language like C/C++ or a more dynamic language like Python or JavaScript. That got me thinking about what was really happening and what invariants Rust was trying to enforce.

Programming, Memory Management, C, Rust

228 points by ekr____ 5 days ago | 88 comments

Obvious things C should do (digitalmars.com)
Standard C undergoes regular improvements, now at C23. But there are baffling things that have not been fixed at all. The Dlang community embedded a C compiler in the D programming language compiler so it could compile C. This C compiler (aka ImportC) was built from scratch. It provided the opportunity to use modern compiler technology to fix those shortcomings. Why doesn’t Standard C fix them?

Programming Languages, C, Compiler Design

254 points by LorenDB 6 days ago | 298 comments

C: Simple Defer, Ready to Use (wordpress.com)
With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use C’s future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.

C, Programming, Defer Statement, Compiler Tools

175 points by ingve 11 days ago | 152 comments

Ask HN: Why do/don't you use C? (ycombinator.com)
I've been having a blast writing projects in C lately (emulator, raycaster) and using it extensively for a game engine I'm making.

Programming, C, Game Development

16 points by purple-leafy 12 days ago | 35 comments

Writing a simple pool allocator in C (8dcc.github.io)
I found out about pool allocators some time ago, and I really liked its simplicity and high performance, so I decided to write my own. This article was initially inspired by Dmitry Soshnikov’s article.

Programming, C, Memory Management

307 points by 8dcc 12 days ago | 142 comments

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust (theregister.com)
Computer scientists affiliated with France's Inria and Microsoft have devised a way to automatically turn a subset of C code into safe Rust code, in an effort to meet the growing demand for memory safety.

Programming Languages, Rust, C, Security

6 points by isaacfrond 15 days ago | 0 comments

Syzygy: Dual Code-Test C to Rust Translation Using LLMs and Dynamic Analysis (arxiv.org)
Despite extensive usage in high-performance, low-level systems programming applications, C is susceptible to vulnerabilities due to manual memory management and unsafe pointer operations.

Rust, C, Programming Languages, Software Security, AI

7 points by belter 18 days ago | 2 comments

Write a Shell in C (2015) (brennan.io)
It’s easy to view yourself as “not a real programmer.” There are programs out there that everyone uses, and it’s easy to put their developers on a pedestal. Although developing large software projects isn’t easy, many times the basic idea of that software is quite simple. Implementing it yourself is a fun way to show that you have what it takes to be a real programmer.

Programming, C, Tutorials

205 points by sebg 22 days ago | 16 comments

Train a Mnist VAE with C and CUDA (github.com/ggerganov)
Hi, I just want to share what I have been working on recently. This is an example of training a MNIST VAE. The goal is to use only ggml pipeline and its implementation of ADAM optimizer.

Machine Learning, Programming, C, CUDA, Generative AI

54 points by bssrdf 27 days ago | 2 comments

Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized (arxiv.org)
The popularity of the Rust language continues to explode; yet, many critical codebases remain authored in C, and cannot be realistically rewritten by hand. Automatically translating C to Rust is thus an appealing course of action.

Rust, C, Programming Languages, Software Development, Formal Verification

291 points by love2read 28 days ago | 157 comments

Fixing C Strings (thasso.xyz)
It’s well-known that null-terminated C strings are bug-prone and unsafe to use. They’re the stereotypical footgun. I’ve been tinkering in a bare-metal environment recently, writing all code myself, including the common types and routines you find in libc or similar. In all the code I wrote, there is not at single null-terminated string, and I have yet to encounter a bug related to bounds checking on strings or buffers.

Programming, C, Security

32 points by ushakov 32 days ago | 65 comments

Show HN: Non-backtracking, Unicode aware regular expression library in C89 (github.com/mnurzia)
Compact, non-backtracking, unicode aware regular expressions in C89

Software, Programming Languages, Regular Expressions, C, Unicode

7 points by mnurzia 34 days ago | 3 comments

Show HN: I built an embeddable Unicode library with MISRA C conformance (railgunlabs.com)
Embeddable Unicode® algorithms.

Software, Programming, C, Unicode, MISRA

117 points by hgs3 34 days ago | 48 comments

C has its limits. If you know where to look (subethasoftware.com)
Thank you, Bing Copilot (ChatGPT), for giving me another “thing I just learned” to blog about.

Programming, C, Limits, Blogging

16 points by jandeboevrie 39 days ago | 4 comments

Is this the weirdest thing in C? (wordpress.com)
There are many weird things in C. So many that it is one of the reasons why C can be a challenging language for novice programmers. But what is the weirdest? Well in my experience, the weirdest things in C all have to do with pointers, but the weirdest one may be x[i] == i[x].

Programming, C, Pointers

8 points by rbanffy 40 days ago | 6 comments

Show HN: A portable hash map in C (github.com/e-dant)
A small, portable, linear-probing hash map in C.

C, Data Structures, Hash Tables, Software, GitHub

176 points by e-dant 40 days ago | 90 comments

Ask HN: Best dev environment for C in 2024? (ycombinator.com)
Accepting suggestions about anything: IDEs, compilers, editors, editor extensions, etc.

Programming, C, Development Environments

8 points by labarilem 42 days ago | 14 comments

Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C (github.com/alxyng)
A clone of .GEARS' Flappy Bird in just over 1000 lines of C.

Programming, C, Game Development

157 points by alexyoung91 44 days ago | 56 comments

CJIT – C, Just in Time (dyne.org)
CJIT is a lightweight C interpreter that lets you run C code instantly, without needing to build it first. Just use the executable interpreter: no extra tools, libs, or headers required.

C, Interpreters, Programming Languages, Runtime

12 points by sharjeelsayed 46 days ago | 0 comments

Wrote a custom libc for POSIX and x86-64 (github.com/elricmann)
C library (POSIX & x86-64)

Operating Systems, C, Software Development

17 points by elricmann 48 days ago | 7 comments

The trouble with struct sockaddr's fake flexible array (lwn.net)
Flexible arrays — arrays that are declared as the final member of a structure and which have a size determined at run time — have long drawn the attention of developers seeking to harden the kernel against buffer-overflow vulnerabilities.

Kernel Security, Programming, C, Networking

96 points by signa11 50 days ago | 56 comments

Truly portable C applications (lwn.net)
Programming language polyglots are files that are valid programs in multiple languages, and do different things in each. While polyglots are normally nothing more than a curiosity, the Cosmopolitan Libc project has been trying to put them to a novel use: producing native, multi-platform binaries that run directly on several operating systems and architectures. There are still some rough edges with the project's approach, but it is generally possible to build C programs into a polyglot format with with minimal tweaking.

Programming Languages, C, Operating Systems, Cross-Platform

53 points by signa11 57 days ago | 36 comments

Why Smart C Coders Love Lua (realtimelogic.com)

Programming, Lua, C

11 points by willhschmid 59 days ago | 6 comments

Raylib 5.5 – a library to program graphic apps in C (github.com/raysan5)
One year after raylib 5.0 release, arribes raylib 5.5, the next big revision of the library. It's been 11 years since raylib 1.0 release and in all this time it has never stopped growing and improving. With an outstanding number of new contributors and improvements, it's, again, the biggest raylib release to date.

New Releases, Programming, C, Game Development, Libraries

7 points by raysan 60 days ago | 0 comments

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again (theregister.com)
Developers looking to continue working in the C and C++ programming languages amid the global push to promote memory-safe programming now have another option that doesn't involve learning Rust.

Programming Languages, C, Rust

6 points by tux1968 61 days ago | 0 comments

C Compiler to SPIR-V (github.com/heroseh)
HCC is a C compiler that allows you to compile your C codebase (with limitations) to SPIR-V for the Vulkan graphics API. This means you can share struct's, enum's and functions between your CPU & GPU code. HCC targets the future of GPU programming so is designed around features such as bindless resources and scalar alignment. This makes it easier to interop with the GPU and focus on writing shader code without writing your own shader build system.

C, Compilers, Graphics Programming, Vulkan, SPIR-V

89 points by bwidlar 63 days ago | 11 comments

Trapc – The Memory Safe C (theregister.com)
Exclusive C and C++ programmers may not need to learn Rust after all to participate in the push for memory safety.

Programming Languages, Memory Safety, C

7 points by synergy20 66 days ago | 0 comments

C Gibberish to English (cdecl.org)

C, Programming, Tools, Documentation

66 points by warkanlock 67 days ago | 50 comments

Is `(expession, lvalue) = rvalue` a valid assignment in C or C++? (stackoverflow.com)
Some time ago I stumbled upon the idea of how a C construct, such as (expr0, expr1, expr2), evaluates (see "What does the comma operator , do?" for more context).