Don’t worry bud, I’ll upvote you. Not everyone is afraid of pointers.

Yup. Stopped answering questions as soon as they did that.

A related problem I see on YouTube is talking heads pruning their comments to create mini echo chambers. This is a real problem.

Lol leave. That is so many levels of braindead.

Get it in the schools. It’s a bad habit from many people’s childhood that they need to break. Make that original habit not suck.

You want to see a picture of me when I was younger?

I’m not sure what metric you’re using to determine this. The bottom line is, if you’re trying to get the CPU to really fly, using memory efficiently is just as important (if not more) than the actual instructions you send to it. The reason for this is the high latency required to go out to external memory. This is performance 101.

Just wanted to point out that the number 1 performance blocker in the CPU is memory. In the general case, if you’re wasting memory, you’re wasting CPU. These two things really cannot be talked about in isolation.

Guy from '95: “I bet it’s lightning fast though…”

No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touting a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they’re genuinely proud of it.

Then, they look confused when I tell them I don’t want the thing connected to the Internet.

100% this. The base algorithms used in LLMs have been around for at least 15 years. What we have now is only slightly different than it was then. The latest advancement was training a model on stupid amounts of scraped data off the Internet. And it took all that data to make something that gave you half decent results. There isn’t much juice left to squeeze here, but so many people are assuming exponential growth and “just wait until the AI trains other AI.”

It’s really like 10% new tech and 90% hype/marketing. The worst is that it’s got so many people fooled you hear many of these dumb takes from respectable journalists interviewing “tech” journalists. It’s just perpetuating the hype. Now your boss/manager is buying in =]

What’s wrong with c unions? I’ve never heard that complaint.

Just watched this. Thank you. I think I’d agree with most of what he says there. I like trying languages, and I did try rust. I didn’t like fighting with the compiler, but once I was done fighting the compiler, I was somehow 98% done with the project. It kind of felt like magic in that way. There are lots of great ideas in there, but I didn’t stick with it. A little too much for me in the end. One of my favorite parts C is how simple it is. Like you would never be able to show me a line of C I couldn’t understand.

That said, I’ve fallen in love a language called Odin. Odin has a unique take on allocators in general. It actually gives you even more control than C while providing language support for the more basic containers like dynamic arrays and maps.

Hahaha. I knew I was wrong about the polymorphism there. You used big words and I’m a grug c programmer =]

We use those generic containers in c as well. Just, that we roll our own.

Move semantics in the general idea of ownership I can see more of a use for.

I would just emphasize that manual memory management really isn’t nearly as scary as it’s made out to be. So, it’s frustrating to see the ridiculous lengths people go to to avoid it at the expense of everything else.

Maybe I’m wrong, but aren’t move semantics mostly to aid with smart pointers and move constructors an optimization to avoid copy constructors? Neither of which exist in c.

I’m not sure what collection type you’re referring to, but most c programmers would probably agree that polymorphism isn’t a good thing.

But it’s a single problem.

Preach brother, I don’t think that’s a hot take at all. I’ve become almost twice as productive since moving from c++ to c. I think I made the change when I was looking into virtual destructors and I was thinking, “at what point am I solving a problem the language is creating?” Another good example of this is move semantics. It’s only a solution to a problem the language invented.

My hot take: The general fear of pointers needs to die.

You may also like Odin if you haven’t already started zig. It’s less of a learning curve and feels more like what c should have always been. It has defer and simple generics, but doesn’t have the magic of comptime.

I can’t believe I’m actually upvoting that statement… coming from a former windows nerd (until 7).

Preach brother!