Yet another Hacker News

59 points AlexeyBrin 2 days ago 10 comments

rramadass 1 hour ago | parent

Also see Templates in C by David Priver - https://www.davidpriver.com/ctemplates.html

He also has other interesting C techniques, namely;

Adding reflection to C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49964525

_Generic for Type Reification in C - https://www.davidpriver.com/creification.html

See also his C2y interpreter with REPL named "DrC" for the upcoming C29 standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C29_(C_standard_revision)) - https://github.com/drpriver/drc

PS: I really like his style of writing and presentation; concise and precise without unnecessary fluff and page beautifying.

podocarp 51 minutes ago | parent

Lol at some point just implement a small compiler in C… reflection is kinda a hilarious thing to have like I understand the use case for generics, since it's not that that that hard to do with macros and quite commonly wished for

lor_louis 58 minutes ago | parent

I wrote a summarizing article on type safe container types a while back, but with some C23 specific changes and a few tweaks to work better for complex types.

https://louissven.xyz/article/how_I_do_container_types_in_C....

Feel free to flag/delete if this isn't the place.

tniemi 39 minutes ago | parent

That `(1 ? (item) : (list)->payload)` was a neat trick. It gets optimized away, but the type comparison happens before that.

Still feels a bit like a party trick, but if it works...

Xirdus 22 minutes ago | parent

Expressions that compile but never evaluate are bread and butter in C++ template metaprogramming.

veexx103 39 minutes ago | parent

Is it feasible to create a new language by adding features to C

just as was done with C++?

pjmlp 5 minutes ago | parent

And Objective-C, yet somehow people reinvent them badly in C.

nikbackm 4 minutes ago | parent

There are already plenty of such languages, Zig among others.

carlos256 14 minutes ago | parent

Jesus, I hate those macro hacks so much. Most of the time you only need a single container, so writing an ad-hoc implementation is cleaner than that.

pjmlp 4 minutes ago | parent

The extent some will go to avoid touching C++.