2y ago

My personal C coding style as of late 2023

This has been a ground-breaking year for my C skills, and paradigm shifts in my technique has provoked me to reconsider my habits and coding style. It’s been my largest personal style change in years, so I’ve decided to take a snapshot of its current state and my reasoning. These changes have produced significant productive and organizational benefits, so while most is certainly subjective, it likely includes a few objective improvements. I’m not saying everyone should write C this way, and when I contribute code to a project I follow their local style. This is about what works well for me.

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2y ago

My personal C coding style as of late 2023

nullprogram.com /blog/2023/10/08/

2 comments

a.k.a "if we could make C look more like Rust" :)
I suppose he had to wrap all the standard string operations to update the count field? Probably with a small performance hit to count the length of the result.

There are some pretty wild takes here. I fully support his freedom to code in whatever style he wants to but a few of these are very un-idiomatic and will make it harder for anyone else to understand his code. eg. I do see some older C code which uses custom names for the standard integer types, but most of it's trying to solve legacy windows portability annoyances, not just redefine the world for the sake of personal taste. I'd hope that modern code wouldn't do that. He might like it but it just increases friction for anyone else working on his code.
There are some poorly thought out takes too: "const doesn't help with optimisation so I don't use it". const isn't there for optimisation, it's there to expose bugs in memory handling. This is basically a statement that he refuses to use best practices for avoiding bugs.