On: Effective Rust (2021)

[plandis]

C is not what I would call a very readable language. I don’t think you could drop someone who newly learned C and have them be effective looking at glibc for example.

[queuebert → plandis]

Because of the use or abuse of macros, different C codebases can look very different, and to learn it you have to figure out all the quirky macros. If people stick to standard C with few macros and verbose variable names, it's really not bad.

[duped → queuebert]

    void* (*identifier) (void*);

    typedef struct
    {
        /* ... */
    } my_struct_t;


    static return_type
    name_of_function (type *restrict argument)
      {
            int a, b, c;
            /* body */
      }

Just some examples of illegible syntax that's "standard" C. C is not a pretty language. It's small, but it's ugly as sin.

[dcow → duped]

It's nearly impossible to actually parse anything more complex than a pointer to a struct in C because it wasn't written for humans, it is a relic of using a convenient recursive descent parser to parse C's syntax that we end up with `void* (*id) (void*)`...