Very pretty C code. Rarely I find myself thinking 'C is beautiful'

skylan_q · on Sept 30, 2014

I thought the same thing. It's like Matz writes C the way he'd like to write ruby. I also see some smalltalk inspiration in his style.

Very neat.

agumonkey · on Sept 30, 2014

If I was able to write that kind of C code, I'd never feel the need to use ruby, python maybe even lisp :)

TickleSteve · on Oct 2, 2014

Sorry, I have to disagree with you there, as someone with decades of C and c++ experience, this is very dense, averagely-tidy, but using some very-definitely-bad-practice macros (See the definition of "SHOW"). C and C++ can look a hell of a lot better than this....

pjc50 · on Oct 1, 2014

In what way is it beautiful? I had a look and found it to be covered in nasty #ifdefs.

yoklov · on Oct 1, 2014

As someone who has written C professionally in the past, I agree. IMO this is fairly ugly C. Definitely can't see why someone would consider it to be beautiful.

That said, there are some neat things I've seen in the ruby C code in the past. I thought [1] was pretty clever (this pattern shows up several times in the ruby source) the first time I saw it, since it lets you access the members of the union like `foo->as.thing`, which is fairly pretty IMO.

[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/include/ruby/ruby.h#...