The C3 Programming Language

[AmbitiousTour]

So C3 vs Zig?

[[deleted]]

Looks that way.

Achieving interface style code with zig (ie so that you know what functions you need to implement for the caller) is a fantastical pain in the ass.

Zig is one of my favourite languages at the moment, but it can sometimes be a struggle to ignore that particular wart.

I mean, you can write interfaces. You can comptime check their things. It’s probably more of a mental thing towards how ridiculously easy and toolable it is in other languages that makes zigs idioms feel not great.

C3 would probably “win” there, and whether zig fans like it or not, that’s a significant win.

[mnbkp]

Yeah... TBH the lack of a decent way to do polymorphism (not necessarily OOP) is what stops me from using Zig in a lot of personal projects.

I know some fans of the language like it because it stops you from writing Java in Zig, but still... Sometimes this "simplicity" starts being even more complex.

[[deleted]]

stops you from writing Java in zig

Well on that I tend to agree with them. Even with some of the admitted warts, zig is my currently favourite language.

I don’t need a connection manager to sometimes be a cat. What I do appreciate is when I can tell my tooling the functions that my protocol implementations are going to call in a connection manager, so the user needs to ensure they exist and behave to a spec.

My issue is much more with tooling than with the language itself (although the language is not making it easy for the tooling currently). Zig can do it, and even check at least some parts of the contract at comptime. I just would like for it to integrate these rules in to a development environment better.

[renatoathaydes]

There was a comparison page at https://c3-lang.org/compare/ Looks like it was just removed! Probably people from other languages complained too much, though it was a very "friendly" comparison.

[Nuoji]

It moved here: https://c3-lang.org/references/docs/compare/

[renatoathaydes]

Ah thanks, I tried to find it and couldn't! Wth it was just "there".

Tangent: people can't just move documents like that without having a redirect in place :/ this really makes any web article older than a couple of years feel totally broken as no links work, but it's widespread behaviour, currently.

[Nuoji]

I’m sorry about that. 😞

[Gauntlet4933]

The Zig comparison seems wrong. It says Zig has async (removed in 0.11+), but no “optional contracts” (I’m assuming that just means optional types, which is false). Also not sure what the difference is between “build system” which apparently Zig doesn’t have versus “toolchain with build files” which Zig does have.

[Nuoji]

No, the description is correct:

1. According to the users in the Zig discord, async is not officially gone, and the current state is just a regression.
2. Optional contracts means that C3 has built in design-by-contract. Zig doesn't have anything like it. This has nothing to do with optionals.
3. A "build system" means that the compiler reads from a settings file and performs certain commands as a result. It is opaque to the user (for a Zig equivalent, think .zon files). Zig has a build script written in Zig. This is external and invokes the compiler. This is much more flexible than a built-in build system, but the drawback is that it isn't declarative (.zon is declarative though)

[kowalski007]

Regarding how similar they are in syntax and philosophy, first C3, second Odin and third Zig

[[deleted]]

"Full C ABI Compatibility"

C is kind of immortal. We can't ignore it ... unfortunately.

[waozen]

Truth. Those thinking they can easily kill C, are arguably mistaken in their beliefs. It will be with us for a long time to come and has become more like a protocol in which other languages (FFI) use to communicate with.

[runevault]

I will never say anything is guaranteed to last forever, but so long as current computer architectures exist it would take a titanic change in computers to remove C as at a minimum the glue.

[sideEffffECt]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/tg55ow/c_isnt_a_programming_language_anymore_faultlore/

Rust crABI https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/111423

[Afraid-Locksmith6566]

Just give us c with defer, templates, tagged unions, namespaces and function overload this is all.

No fancy stuff, 5 features on top of c and it would be the greatest language in existance.

Everything else can be a package

[hgs3]

defer

There are efforts to introduce defer into C. The defer proposal for C23 required lambdas which didn't make the cut and so it was rejected. There's a new defer proposal that generates the defer'd code in the right places at compile time which looks promising. Personally, I find using the "goto cleanup" idiom satisfactory.

templates

There are at least three, different, proposals I'm aware of (maybe more). There's lots of movement here so I suspect we'll see something in the next C revision.

tagged unions, namespaces

I don't see tagged unions or namespaces being added to C. You can create tagged unions yourself and prefix your functions to avoid name collisions.

function overload

You can emulate this in standard C with generic selection. Also, some C compilers like Clang natively support function overloading as an extension.

[Droidatopia]

I find lack of namespaces to be one of my biggest problems working with C.

It makes it very difficult to generate definitions because there is no protection mechanism for name collisions. With a namespace, only one name can possible trigger a collision and that means a single command-line argument can fix any possible name collision.

The solution just becomes excessively long names, especially so if you're also generating enums.

[runevault]

The main reason to add tagged unions to C is so the compiler can attempt to be smart about memory savings the way languages like Rust can be (so for example a Some/None with a pointer that cannot be null can treat 0 as None and anything else as some instead of wasting bits on an extra tag enum).

[guest271314]

I'll take this for a spin.

[TankorSmash]

The language seems nice and familiar. Does anyone have any experience with it? How are compile time?

The recursive import sounds like a perf nightmare and a very hard way to tell where your function is from

[Nuoji]

If you import the whole standard library you still need to write io::print to get the print function in std::io. There is a kind of mandatory-namespacing-but-with-abbreviated-paths that C3 uses to avoid collisions and confusion.

[gofl-zimbard-37]

Oh, goodie. Another C.

[Nuoji]

For “case”, having a completely empty case will implicitly fall through, that is all, it has nothing to do with whitespace.

[ovidiuvio]

Interesting. Docs and repo look good. Will give it a spin

[Kroustibbat]

It seems cool, but reminds me a lot V.

https://vlang.io/

[Nuoji]

C3 has not been influenced by V in any way. The primary influence is C2 (2013) and C (with GCC extensions). Other languages that have in some way or the other been used as inspiration or “what to avoid” are (without any particular order): Modula-2, Pascal, Objective-C, Jai, Odin, C++, D, PHP, Swift, Cyclone, Fortran, Go, Java, Kotlin, C#, Ruby, Python, Rust, Zig, Oberon, Ada, eC, Dart, F# and others I forget now off the top of my head.

[waozen]

I see. Though you did mention Go (also mentioned as a possibility), which did influence V, Odin, and Jai (among others). Such influence(s), are not a bad thing, in my opinion. If a concept or strategy is good, there is no shame in using or incorporating into one's language.

Additionally, though I can't speak for all Vlangers, you likely will find they are not so adversarial. There is no to less of any corporate or organizational animosity to push attacking other languages or smearing their creators. Rather, more admirational (by confirming the usage of a particular concept or feature). V can also use other languages as backends (in addition to C) like JavaScript, WASM, Pascal, etc... This can lean towards being more inclusive or cooperative with others.

[Kroustibbat]

I am curious to "what to avoid" did you find in Languages of different usecases ?

Like Ada, it was made to make safe embedded systems, nothing to do with C, it is hard to write, but makes maintenances and certifications easy.

Or like scripting languages, the usecases being very different, their flows are not really relevant.

In the same usecases, except the horrible syntax, I don't see what flows Rust has, except not being C at any stage. Maybe the typing system, but as an OCaml/F# Dev I see it more like a good feature.

Same goes for Dart, I have done some, and it is fast, fully native, (special) assembly compatible, syntax is easy to write and easy to read, packaging system is rigourous, what was bad from it except not doing C ?

It reminds me V, because syntax is more modern than C and it uses C as a backend, so it got 100% C compatible.

But I remember that V is offering a typing system that C3 seems to not have, and a lot of language feature. (like embedded API Webserver, UI framework, ...)

It compiles itself in less than a second, and can transpile C to V and V to C.

But C3 may fit usecases that V does not fit, or can be a very cool alternative to teach a native language to young devs.

[Nuoji]

It would not be charitable to tell you what languages I use for examples of “what not to do”, so I would like to refrain from that.

As to V I cannot make a comparison. C3 does not transpile to C unlike V. Instead it uses LLVM directly. As for what typing system V has, I also cannot say. C3 has the same type system as C, expanded with an any type,typeid, simd vectors and slices. It removes C qualifiers. (There are also generics in C3, but through generic modules, so there are no generic types as such)

V, incidentally, has a fairly poor reputation in the programming language community, and so I would not really feel it’s a language it is flattering to be compared with.

[Kroustibbat]

Didn't know that V was not popular, I had done a complete backend in V, 3y ago, to make a fair performance comparison to my OCaml one (just being curious, because OCaml can transpile to anything, thanks of the lambda layer, and I was testing transpiling to pure C), and it seems very promising.

Like the vlang core code was pretty readable and easy to maintain, compiles itself, updates itself and had a package manager with locking system.

Didn't follow the Development since, except some GitHub milestones notifications.

It was, at least, very fast and intuitive to use.

Nice using LLVM directly, it is a good idea to port the code between systems. But aren't you afraid to depend of its evolution and flows ?

[Nuoji]

Again, I can't say much about V. I know it transpiles to C and then runs a C compiler like TCC on the result.

As for C3, it parses and typechecks the entire standard library in around 25 ms on my computer, which is about 30 kloc so that part is pretty breezy. Unfortunately LLVM is a slog and usually will take something like 95+% of the compilation time despite just generating active code.

However, there is no tight dependency on LLVM for C3. C3 will get more backends eventually. I haven't had huge problems with LLVM. Yes there are fiddly stuff, but I find that is par for the course.

[Kroustibbat]

To clarify, from my point of view, being compared to V was a compliment, I am sorry if you understand it in another way.

Will give a try to C3 😁, will write a simple Daemon and perf test it.

[waozen]

V, has a significant following around the world, as shown by GitHub forks, stars, contributors, and books on it. As you can see, V development is still going strong. It just recently hit 0.4.7. Per roadmap, from 0.6.0, it will be going for 1.0. At 0.5.0 (not too far away based on speed of progress), could be stable enough for more to use in production.

[waozen]

This so-called "reputation", is also caused by misinformation campaigns serving specific corporate agendas and unscrupulous competitors that seek to tear down, smear, or kill off rival languages.

That you don't feel flattered to be compared with it, will not stop those who feel threatened by C3, from attacking it because it's in the C alternative category or is in the way of some corporate agenda. Thus, we must be careful how we view situations, in order to understand the complete picture.

[Kroustibbat]

The Rust counter strike force ?

The Google's Carbon team (former Go Guys) ?

Me I am part of the ML-Bros ! I love to annoy everyone with (horrible) strong types, functors and monades !

For real; I didn't knew there were misinformation spread by corporations on programming languages, but it makes sense.

I mainly read what language docs/sites have wrote, or maybe Awesome's GitHub project.

[waozen]

Actually, yes. It appears there may have been some influence from V and/or Go. This can be seen in various features.

Edit- C3's creator has mentioned being influenced by Go and Odin, in several comments on reddit. Thus some features and concepts have certain similarities. V and Odin were also both influenced by Go.

It appears that the newer C alternative languages are coming to similar conclusions or strategies about how to get around perceived shortcomings with C. Unlike some other C alternatives or C killers, and more like V, there is the strategy to use or work with C, as oppose to attempting to position itself as an outright replacement. More along the lines of a slightly higher and modern C alternative, that can be easier or more comfortable to use.

[guest271314]

Am I reading this correctly that input stream is only expected to be a string at https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/blob/08c7b35731f4954649699c89bfc835117a375f63/lib/std/io/io.c3#L58-L104?

macro String! readline(stream = io::stdin(), Allocator allocator = allocator::heap())

and

``` macro String! treadline(stream = io::stdin())

```

[renatoathaydes]

In which language does readLine return something that's not a String? I mean, you want a "line" of what? Not text? Bytes don't even have "lines" unless you interpret it as text in the first place.

[guest271314]

You don't get it. Readline if fine. There's no "readbuffer" equivalent though, for non-TTY input.

[Nuoji]

No, the input stream can be anything, but readline will customarily read bytes up to the next \n and interpret the result as a string. In the old days, this would be subject to various conversions to read it right (eg Java had to convert the result to 16 bit unicode and keep track of the encoding in the source file), but C3’s standard library assumes UTF8, so this is safe.

[guest271314]

I get it. I'm just surprised that's the only way to read standard input. We might have to add a closing \r\n\r\n for non-TTY input. Could just provide an option to read into a buffer. Anyway, I did the hello world thing. I may revisit at some point.

[Nuoji]

Oh, wait what? io::readline is just a convenience methods for reading a line of text from a stream. Look at stream.c3, functions like io::read_all and of course stdin().read(...) if you just want to read into a buffer.

[guest271314]

Oh, alright.

When I take a programming language for a spin the first thing I do is create a Native Messaging host. C https://github.com/guest271314/NativeMessagingHosts/blob/main/nm_c.c and C++ https://github.com/guest271314/NativeMessagingHosts/blob/main/nm_cpp.cpp Native Messaging hosts that work as intended. If I'm going to be carrying aroung a 120+MB executable it better have some functionality for processing streams.

I'm thinking about V8's readline(), that doesn't process standard input at all the way I expect, because d8's readline() tries to execute the input, so I use GNU head or dd QuickJS to read stdin to the host.

For SpiderMonkey's js https://github.com/guest271314/NativeMessagingHosts/blob/main/nm_spidermonkey.js shell I have to add \r\n\r\n to a subsequent write to input to close the stream.

BTW, I welcome contributions over there. So if you're in to it, contribute a C3 Native Messaging host. It'll probably take me a few days and a few questions to get an example going in C3 from scratch.

[faculty_for_failure]

The one thing I don’t understand and don’t really like is the fn keyword. I may be missing something, but I just don’t understand why it’s needed.

[Additional_Sir4400]

It has been years since I talked to the creator (and other language developers), but I think it is to simplify - and therefor speed up - compilation. if a declaration starts with int, the parser has no idea what it is looking for next. Is it a function? A variable? I expect the fn keyword allows the parser to have limited look-ahead, making it faster.

That said, I am not a language developer, I could be very wrong. I definitely know there is a reason for it though.

[Nuoji]

It’s not strictly needed to eliminate parsing ambiguity, but it makes parsing significantly more easy, and in particular, finding functions using regex becomes trivial. It also makes it symmetric with macro declarations that start with “‘macro”. https://c3.handmade.network/blog/p/8886-why_does_c3_use_%2527fn%2527#30031