C Programming Language

I encounter memory corruption issue at work coming from a signal handler and decided to write a blog post about it. Feedback welcome.

C is one of the top languages in terms of speed, memory and energy

https://www.threads.com/@engineerscodex/post/C9_R-uhvGbv?hl=en

For the big brain 10,000 meter view, defer ⸺ and the forthcoming TS 25755 ⸺ is a general-purpose block/scope-based “undo” mechanism that allows you to ensure that no matter what happens a set of behavior (statements) are run.

There's no perhaps about the FBI and CISA getting snippy at buffer overflows. These people worry about exploits that threaten car-crash incidents in enterprise IT, and they've seen enough to get angry. It's not that making mistakes is a crime when writing code. No human endeavor worth doing is without error. It's more that this class of bug is avoidable, and has been for decades, yet it pours out of big tech like woodworm from a church pew. Enough already, they say. They are right.

Any good cheat sheets about C?

I have found only this one https://cheatography.com/ashlyn-black/cheat-sheets/c-reference/

Maybe you know any else?

@c_lang@programming.dev

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22432836

I created a little side project over the past few days, a new build system for C and C++: https://github.com/blueOkiris/acbs/

I've seen a lot of discourse over C build tools. None of them really seem solid except for (some) Makefiles (some Makefiles are atrocious; you just can't rely on people these days). Bazel, cmake - they're just not straight forward like a clean Makefile is, basically black magic, but setting up a Makefile from scratch is a skill. Many copy the same one over each time. Wouldn't it be nice if that Makefile didn't even need to be copied over?

Building C should be straight forward. Grab the C files and headers I want, set some flags, include some libraries, build, link. Instead project build systems are way way way overcomplicated! Like have you ever tried building any of Google's C projects? Nearly impossible to figure out and integrate with projects.

So I've designed a simplistic build system for C (also C++) that is basically set up to work like a normal Makefile with gcc but where you don't have to set it up each time. The only thing you are required to provide is the name of the binary (although you can override defaults for your project, and yes, not just binaries are possible but libs as well). It also includes things like delta building without needing to configure.

Now there is one thing I haven't added yet - parallel building. It should be as simple as adding separate threads when building files (right now it's a for loop). I know that's something a lot of people will care about, but it's not there yet. It's also really intended to only work with Linux rn, but it could probably pretty easily be adjusted to work with Windows.

Lay your project out like the minimal example, adjust the project layout, and get building! The project itself is actually bootstrapped and built using whatever the latest release is, so it's its own example haha.

It's dead simple and obvious to the point I would claim that if your project can't work with this, your project is wrong and grossly over-complicated in its design, and you should rework the build system. C is simple, and so should the build system you use with it!

So yeah. Check it out when y'all get a chance

This article is about developing in C for CP/M, using a 40-year-old C compiler, and how this differs from modern C development. The compiler I'm using is the 1982 release of Manx Software Systems' "Aztec C". The compiler is freely, and legally, available from the Aztec Museum. A lot of CP/M software falls into the broad category of "abandonware" -- software that is notionally still protected by intellectual propery law, but whose owners have no interest in it, or cannot even be identified.

Book Description

Writing a C Compiler will take you step by step through the process of building your own compiler for a significant subset of C—no prior experience with compiler construction or assembly code needed. Once you’ve built a working compiler for the simplest C program, you’ll add new features chapter by chapter. The algorithms in the book are all in pseudocode, so you can implement your compiler in whatever language you like. Along the way, you’ll explore key concepts like:

• Lexing and parsing: Learn how to write a lexer and recursive descent parser that transform C code into an abstract syntax tree.
• Program analysis: Discover how to analyze a program to understand its behavior and detect errors.
• Code generation: Learn how to translate C language constructs like arithmetic operations, function calls, and control-flow statements into x64 assembly code.
• Optimization techniques: Improve performance with methods like constant folding, dead store elimination, and register allocation.

Compilers aren’t terrifying beasts—and with help from this hands-on, accessible guide, you might even turn them into your friends for life.

Author Bio

Nora Sandler is a software engineer based in Seattle. She holds a BS in computer science from the University of Chicago, where she researched the implementation of parallel programming languages. More recently, she’s worked on domain-specific languages at an endpoint security company. You can find her blog on pranks, compilers, and other computer science topics at https://norasandler.com/.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17545833

im new to system programming, idk if thats the issuse. but according gcc, it can not find dbus/dbus-arch-deps.h and thats all i know. any idea about this issue?

 program
[I] tomri@artix ~ [1]> cat main.c
#include <dbus-1.0/dbus/dbus.h>

int main(void) { return 0; }

# error
[I] tomri@artix ~> gcc main.c
In file included from main.c:1:
/usr/include/dbus-1.0/dbus/dbus.h:29:10: fatal error: dbus/dbus-arch-deps.h: No such file or directory
   29 | #include <dbus/dbus-arch-deps.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

[I] tomri@artix ~> ls -la /usr/include/dbus-1.0/dbus/
total 216
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  4096 Jul  2 20:26 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root  4096 Jun 15 21:36 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2809 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-address.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3470 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-bus.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27018 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-connection.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2909 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-errors.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22076 Jun  8  2023 dbus-glib-bindings.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2575 Jun  8  2023 dbus-glib-lowlevel.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14766 Jun  8  2023 dbus-glib.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  8969 Jun  8  2023 dbus-gtype-specialized.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1464 Jun  8  2023 dbus-gvalue-parse-variant.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  7246 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-macros.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1961 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-memory.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15259 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-message.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1810 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-misc.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3809 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-pending-call.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 23956 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-protocol.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5412 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-server.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5392 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-shared.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3047 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-signature.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2359 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-syntax.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  8505 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-threads.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  4143 Jan 14 06:17 dbus-types.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3961 Jan 14 06:17 dbus.h
[I] tomri@artix ~> 

# my system
[I] tomri@artix ~> uname --all
Linux artix 6.9.7-artix1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri, 28 Jun 2024 18:11:28 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Hello everyone :)

I recently wrote a small blackjack game where the challenge I set myself (and the learning goal) was to use pointers to do stuff. So for example instead of having all my functions written in such a way as to avoid using pointers I would use them wherever possible.

It works in its current form and seems to do so quite well, but I would like to learn even more from this project. So here I am asking for your experience. Please give me any suggestions, advice, ways to make it more efficient in terms of memory used, ways to make it more efficient in terms of speed (I know memory and speed might not be so important for a small project like this but my goal is to practice and learn the underlying concepts), criticisms, best practices, or anything that comes to mind when you look at the code.

As an example of what I mean, I would like to make it so that the arrays which hold the player and dealer hands are not of fixed size on declaration, but grow and shrink dynamically as cards are added and removed from them (practice memory allocation/deallocation).

I hope I provided enough info about what I am looking for in a clear manner, but if not please do ask for clarification/additional info.

Thanks in advance!

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