C Alive and Well Thanks to Portable.NET

rhysweatherley writes "So C is dead in a world dominated by bytecode languages, is it? Well, not really. Portable.NET 0.6.4 now has a fairly good C compiler that can compile C to IL bytecode, to run on top of .NET runtimes. We need some assistance from the community to port glibc in the coming months, but it is coming along fast. The real question is this: would you rather program against the pitiful number API's that come with C#, or the huge Free Software diversity that you get with C? The death of C has been greatly exaggerated. It will adapt - it always has."

Comments

Re:What about C++?

[lpontiac]

Notice that the KDE camp are humming along quite happily with qt and C++. Everyone clamouring for Mono seems to come from the "just C thanks" GNOME community.

Let it die!

[Lux]

We need C like we need more buffer overflow vulnerabilities!

Let the miserable wretch die, or overhaul it to be type safe.

There are some things that are better buried.

Can I compile the kernel with this Portable.Net?

[KamuSan]

Can I compile the kernel with this Portable.Net stuff? Since the most important thing I can think of that is written in C is the Linux kernel I guess it's a good thing that this Portable.Net stuff is here now C is dying. Otherwise we would never be able to cuild a new kernel, I guess!!

Mularky... C is very much alive.

[borgheron]

C/C++ will likely never die. The problem with bytecode based languages is that they're *SLOW*.. I repeat *SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW* compared to a good optimized C program.

Now you guys can argue your pants off about how "we've got hotspot" and "hotspot should be just as fast as native", but that's just not the case.

GJC