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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."
This is not a turnip.
... if I had an equivalent set of class libraries. Haven't actually seen one for C++, but Cocoa for Objective C is pretty good and there is an ObjC++ compiler.
The way I see it, the benefit of garbage collection is nearly canceled by the lack of stack variables and guaranteed destructor calls. I want to just declare a "Socket" variable in the middle of my function and have a guarantee that the socket will be closed when the block is existed in whatever way. finally or with just don't cut it. Say, I use 2 sockets, 1 file, a mutex and a temporary hash table entry at different points in a function. Imagine the mess of nested blocks, especially since Socket.close can actually throw an exception!
By contrast, memory management problems in C++ can be mitigated by destructors, reference counting and containers that automatically free members. Not ideal, but usually doesn't disfigure your code.
Now add other things missing from Java and/or C# - preprocessor, templates, multiple inheritence, operator overloading, unsigned types - and the new languages are really not that compeling for large projects that need heavy-duty, "dirty" features to manage complexity and can afford a regression suite that runs under Purify to fix memory corruption or leaks.
I know Java 1.5 has generics and C# has some more of C++ features compared to Java, but the matter of fact is that both languages are still tradeoffs compared to C++ in terms of productivity and stability rather than a clear step forward.
I would like to see a language that preserves as many features of C++ as possible while adding garbage collection, memory safety, language-based security and guaranteed binary compatibility between platforms/OSes. I don't think managed C++ is "it". Why can't a VM support multiple inheritence? Any pointers?
C# whips the tar off of Java (and most non-optimized C code) in most benchmarks. Why? Because it's running on Windows only for these benchmarks. Anyone remember IIS running faster than Apache because of MS taking advantadge of undocumented platform APIs?
Do you think C# on Linux/BSD/*nix is going to be near as fast as C# on Windows? Think again. It may eventually catch up, but not before it gets a reputation for being dog slow. (See Java as an example).
C is really fast. If you know how to optimize it, nothing can beat it (except assember or some special Fortran routines, if it works for you project). If you ~don't~ know how to optimize C really well, Java (anywhere) and C# (on Win32) can be as fast or faster. Usually is much faster, these days.
Java runs, with very little effort, on every major OS and platform out there. (And yes, I do this for a living). I work at SAS (http://www.sas.com) and we ship the same codebase on Win32, HP-UX, HPi, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc. The advances in the Just In Time compilers has made a huge difference in performance. (There are some differences in the major J2EE environments, but even that is addressable and minor compared to an entire product port).
Yes, it's still true that a programming guru can write some smoking C code, but Joe Sixpack Programmer usually can't beat Java's performance. And yes, I'm talking big number crunching. At a prior job (at a biotech), we crunched Big Numbers (two month runs on a grid of machines) and Java did a very respectable job. We spent our time improving algorythms (from a bio point of view, not a C/ASM point of view).
The C#/Mono crowd is spending a lot of mindshare in making sure that MS's latest language will run anywhere, and that's great. I am glad they are doing it and applaud the effort.
But Java is far and away the fastest true cross platform language out there right now. It's got the best cross platform enterprise environments available. If you are looking the most speed ~and~ portability, the King isn't dead yet. :)
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