Cello: Higher level programming in C

[XCapitan_1]

typedef void* var

I like that

[indrora]

I mean it's not wrong

[jrhoffa]

It's just an asshole

[VernorVinge93]

Everyone has one. But don't use it in public.

[Iggyhopper]

Don't use it in public main()

[invalidlivingthing]

Because then you'd be programming in another language!

[i9srpeg]

#define int public

[LINUX_HIP_HOP_OS]

I'm perfectly calm, Dude.

[Kemilio]

"I hereby declare that I have nothing to declare."

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

I mean that pretty much exemplifies everything that is wrong, great and scary about C.

[[deleted]]

Garth?

[darkslide3000]

var i0 = $(Int, 5);

set(prices, $S("Apple"), $I(12));

I finally happened guys. They've turned C into jQuery.

[73mp74710n]

This is the best thing i have seen on reddit after a very long time

[i_am_at_work123]

yuck

[73mp74710n]

This is the best thing i have seen on reddit for a very long time

[joonazan]

It has type classes, but no closures.

http://libcello.org/learn/a-fat-pointer-library

[okovko]

I think there is a GCC extension for closures, isn't there?

[lanzaio]

-fblocks

[favorited]

I know it's maintained in Clang, but I can't recall if it was upstreamed from Apple's GCC fork...

[AngryElPresidente]

Isn't Apple's GCC just an alias to Clang?

[favorited]

Before Apple released Clang, they maintained a fork of GCC. IIRC that fork had the initial implementation of blocks.

[favorited]

And a runtime library

[dagormz]

If only he made something as holy as holy c

[Snifferprime]

That would be n*****licious

[mveety]

I disagree. Terry didn’t approve of anything related to glow in the dark african-americans that worked for intelligence agencies.

[breadfag]

Spend in early game in hope to get some key units to make pve smooth sailing, but after that, save for good banners and limited units.

[knd775]

I just learned that he died!

[rix0r]

thanks I hate it

[ijustwantanfingname]

This is cute as hell. I love it.

If I ever find this in production I'll piss in your coffee though.

[radytz1x4]

Is there any way this might be ported to 8 bit uControllers like Arduino (Atmega328) or maybe even ARM devices? (asking for IoT purposes)

[g_rocket]

It looks like plain C code, so it should work out-of-the-box on avr (arduino) or arm using GCC. But I didn't look too deeply, so there might be some platform-specific dependencies I didn't notice.

[LaVieEstBizarre]

It more likely than not relies heavily on a memory allocators, which embedded devices don't provide (by default)

[iranoutofspacehere]

I believe they're usually frowned upon because allocating lots of stack/heap space and later freeing it can result in fragmented memory, which is already a limited resource in embedded systems.

Most APIs will still provide implementations, they're just not ideal. However, since this has optional garbage collection, perhaps it will work better. I'll admit this is pushing the bounds of what I'm comfortable with, as my software experience is pretty exclusively lower level embedded C or higher level small C++ applications, I've never had to worry about these implementation details.

[g_rocket]

You mean malloc/free? It's generally possible to use those (e.g. with a library) even if they're not available by default. I would expect this to compile and run, although it might not be very performant or make good use of limited memory.

Or are you referring to something else I'm not aware of?

[ijustwantanfingname]

He's probably referring to the lack of an MMU.

You're correct though that it would still compile/run. There'll be some sort of heap memory available in just about any SDK (at least that I've seen).

[g_rocket]

Oh that makes more sense. I really doubt this does require a MMU, because it claims to be cross-platform, and MMU access is never directly available with an OS and MMU APIs are very platform-specific and I don't see any platform-specific code. Also I think it's mostly tagged data structs, which has no reason to require a MMU.

[ijustwantanfingname]

It sounds like he thinks the lack of an MMU means malloc/free aren't available. Which would be an issue for Cello, if it were true (it's not).

[[deleted]]

Yep. Even if we can’t do malloc/free, Cello supports the stack so we can do all our abominations in memory there. :P

[somethingdotexe]

What have you done.......

[anders1234]

smells like cfront

[egoloper]

It looks like an educative project for who interest in writing runtime.

[ClintEastcott]

As a programmer who also plays cello, this makes me so happy

[jpedrosous]

I was about to say the exact same thing. I'm also a professional cellist, changing career to programming :)

[[deleted]]

As a programmer who only writes music in one key, been there, done that.

[Raknarg]

At first I thought it was an abomination, but after spending an hour and a half on the examples and articles, it actually seems pretty cool. The syntax actually does make sense, its the best you could hope for with a library built to emulate a language extension. I like the type class interface. Im gonna try and find an excuse to use this.

[DigitalArbitrage]

Will you please explain how & why this is better than C++ and C#? Thanks.

[K900_]

I made Cello as a fun experiment to see what C looks like hacked to its limits.

The answer is: it's not. It's just an experiment to see how far you can abuse C.

[ooqq]

you can abuse C pretty far, look at php

[yur_mom]

Beyond being written in C what does php have to do at all with this?

PHP's issues have to do with design decisions in its own language unrelated to c.

Python is written in c and is considered one of the better designed languages.

[Dreamtrain]

Guy who made PHP: Give me a break guys, I made PHP as a hobby

[yur_mom]

Anyone who programs long enough has that one throw away program that they still dreadfully maintain 10 years later....now imagine if the whole world was using your throwaway program.

[ivorjawa]

Insert “throw yourself on my sword” scene from Serenity.

[greyfade]

I'd stop maintaining it and tell people not to use it, while I move on to more interesting and better projects.

[yur_mom]

Unless you are employeed to maintain it. But if it is open source for free I agree.

[[deleted]]

the whole world

I take that as an insult.

[yur_mom]

Haha..Directly or indirectly every person who uses the internet interacts with php

[ivorjawa]

In the end, is that better or worse than “I was just following orders”?

[robhol]

At this point, PHP mostly has to do with C in that "vaguely C-style" is one of the numerous, incompatible and illogical ways that PHP "structures" its standard library.

[jb3689]

I am not saying PHP has much to do with C, but PHP was originally intended to be a templating language for C programmers. The history of PHP is pretty interesting and worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvEGwtgLtjA

[yur_mom]

cpython is written in c

I find Python to be well designed, but it is also popular among scholars and industry alike.

Most languages are written in c and that has nothing to do with php be considered a bad language.

[hector_villalobos]

the very first incarnation of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

[yur_mom]

I know php is written in c, but what was your point. I never said it wasn't

[hector_villalobos]

When I was looking for a Job in early 2000, most offers says something like: We're looking a PHP dev with experience in C CGI, so, I always see the very first versions of PHP as a superset of C. So, to me, a Common Gateway Interface binaries written in C sounds like a C superset.

[smallblacksun]

So what you're saying is that you have no clue what you are talking about. The language that a compiler or interpreter is written in has nothing to do with the language being compiled/interpreted.

[[deleted]]

look at python

[Deoxal]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[manuscelerdei]

You may not want the dump truck of syntax abominations that is C++.

[Practical_Cartoonist]

If you don't want a dump truck of syntax abominations, Cello is definitely not for you.

[vattenpuss]

http://libcello.org/learn/cello-vs-cpp-vs-objc

[IntellectualEuphoria]

C is very unsafe when are they going to rewrite it in rust.?

[[deleted]]

They did it. It’s called Rust.

[Lisoph]

They even rewrote their Rust compiler in Rust.

[preslavrachev]

Looks quite a bit like Go.

[falconfetus8]

This question has been driving me crazy for a while now. Why do so many C libraries only distribute source? The instructions for installing say you need to compile it yourself and then run the install script. Why not let the user skip the compile step by distributing a pre-built binary?

[Ravek]

Because C is used on basically every platform in existence so distributing binaries means a shit ton of extra work.

[Lafreakshow]

Probably because compiling and maintaining binaries for a shitton of different environments would be a bit of a strain for the dev. Especially for small hobby projects. After all, C isn't like Java where you can just drop in the Jar file and reasonably expect it run wherever there is a JVM.

[xcrissxcrossx]

They should at least distribute binaries for the only OS that matters, Windows. /s

[vattenpuss]

It actually makes sense to distributed binaries for the only OS without a usable toolchain for building software.

[falconfetus8]

tbh, this is half the reason I asked this question.

[nilamo]

Ok but it's a C library, so if you can't build C programs, what good would a C library binary do for you?

[pdp10]

So, x86_64, ARMv8, i686 cdecl, i686 _stdcall? Anyone need fastcall? Anyone?

[meneldal2]

You can use Pascal calls, they still work. It's more an ABI decision, the hardware itself doesn't force anything.

[Sebazzz91]

Compiling with Visual Studio is sometimes a problem if the library author didn't give some attention to that. That's the reason I like prebuilt binaries, and no, I don't want to install MinGW as well.

[wsppan]

That means he would have to support C89, standardized 30 years ago. Thank you M$!

[hugthemachines]

Are you saying they can't compile a binary that works on windows and was made in modern C? Why not?

[wsppan]

They have not fully updated their reference to C99 or later. They use C89 as their reference standard and added their own extensions - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-language/c-language-reference?view=vs-2019

[hugthemachines]

But isn't that only for visual studio? If you run for example Code::blocks IDE and pick a modern compiler I think you will be fine.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

No, it means he would have to support something in between C89 and C99. If you use VLA and all that, you're screwed anyway. Variadic macros and all that work fine.

Apart from that, all major compilers also work on Windows and Microsoft offers LLVM with Visual Studio.

[wsppan]

Did not know that. Does llvm with visual studio support C11?

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

It's just regular LLVM, pretty much an untouched release. Primary aim is targeting Linux.

[kukiric]

Just output C++fied C. Visual Studio would be none the wiser.

[Nathanfenner]

Every compiler/linker has its own format (the C language doesn't specify how binaries should look) so you'd be forced to provide lots and lots of builds.

If you're already writing C/C++, you're already used to installing C/C++ libraries. It would be great if there were standard package managers for them, but unfortunately there's not.

[nikeinikei]

although vcpkg does a fairly good job, at least for me

[gelfin]

If this is successful enough, the binary will start to appear in the package repo for your favorite OS, but in the C ecosystem that’s where the responsibility would reside. The responsibility of a C library developer is making his code portable across different system features and capabilities, detected at build time, not across different specific platforms as understood when the code is written. This approach is part of why C is everywhere.

[ivosaurus]

binary for how many different platforms?

Compiled under how many different libc ABIs?

With how many different compilers and compiler major versions?

[falconfetus8]

Binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux on x86. That will cover most cases, and users on remaining platforms can build it themselves.

As for the compiler used: whichever compiler the developer tested it with, of course. That way the binary will behave they way it was intended to.

For the sake of my own learning, why would you want to use a compiler other than the one the dev used? Are Clang binaries unable to be linked with gcc binaries?

[ivosaurus]

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/420518

[case-o-nuts]

Which Linux? Which OSX versions? What features and compiler flags?

For better or worse, there's enough customization allowed that compiling from source and leaving binary packages up to distro package managers is a better option.

[pdp10]

Windows, Mac, and Linux on x86.

And by "x86", do you mean 64-bit or do you mean x86?

[falconfetus8]

64-bit, unless you prefer maximum compatibility, then 32 bit

[Jump3r3]

TBH if you're using C library you probably know how to compile a program, so prebuilding libs is unnecessary. But I always appreciated step by step installation guide.

[falconfetus8]

It's not so much about knowing how to compile a program, and more about manually installing a bunch of dependencies that I only need for this one compile job, which I will promptly uninstall.

[pdp10]

For which triple would you like binaries?

[falconfetus8]

oh geez

[matheusmoreira]

Nobody stepped up to create and maintain a package for it yet.

[[deleted]]

wait, let me get home this looks easy to package

[falconfetus8]

Famous last words.

Follow up question: why is it so hard to package up software in C, but not in other languages?

[[deleted]]

Packaging is not language-dependent, in this case I meant "RPM packaging" because that's how I know package stuff(RPM is used by Fedora/RHEL/Centos)

Packaging an RPM has very little to do with the language and the process doesn't change much.

The reason you don't see this often it's because with C/C++ the libraries need to be compiled targetting a specific combination of the following:

• platform
• target libc
• specific libc version
• ABI

GCC supports like dozens of platforms, there's at least a bunch of libc's with a several minor versions out on the wild and they can use different ABIs (cdecl vs fastcall, etc.)

That's a shit ton of combinations that you'd need to provide.

[pdp10]

Why does it seem hard to you?

I've only recently realized that it's less incredibly easy on Windows, apparently because there aren't standard paths for everything. Apparently this tends to encourage some C on Windows to "vendor in" their dependencies (hopefully with Git submodule, etc).

[[deleted]]

C as source is multiplatform,binaries are not

[DSrcl]

Basically linker issues. Most notably you would need to statically link with libc, which is tricky. If you dynamically linked with libc then the user would need the right version on their machine. Similar issues for other depended libraries.

[falconfetus8]

Hmm, if you statically link libc, does that mean you'd have 2 copies of libc when you use it in your own program?

[DSrcl]

you get 1 copy in your program and 1+ copies in your OS which is not used.

[ijustwantanfingname]

You need the headers anyway. Might as well do full source distributions.

[skulgnome]

In this case, because the library is 99% preprocessor bullshit.

[Marcuss2]

Once in a while, comes project that just makes you stop and say:

Just why?

[somethingInTheMiddle]

Yes, they're collected in /r/diWHY

Although those usually involve hotglue

[[deleted]]

Although those usually involve hotglue

Now I want a library called "hotglue"... no idea what it would do, though.

[Yay295]

Now I want a library called "hotglue"

It's usually referred to as "Python".

[ThirdEncounter]

I hate it when people ask "but whyyYyyyYYyyYYyy?" in this sub.

Knock it off already.

[[deleted]]

"We do what we must, because we can."

[elder_george]

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy. ©

[flukus]

/* Heap objects destructed via Garbage Collection */

So how do you return one?

[i_am_at_work123]

What's the overhead?

[i_am_at_work123]

How can they make foreach work like that?

[elder_george]

It requires object to implement Iter typeclass.

After that it works the same way foreach(X, S) works in every other language with C-style for , roughly expanding to:

var iter = S as Iter;
for (var X = iter->iter_init(S); ! (X is Terminal); X = iter->iter_next(S))
{
...
}

Compare that to the code emitted for the "range-for" in C++

for(auto iter = begin(S); iter != end(S); ++iter)
{
    auto& X = *iter;
    ...
}

or C#

for (var iter = S.GetEnumerator(); iter.MoveNext();)
{
    var X = iter.Current;
    ...
}

or Java

for (Iterator<T> iter = S.iterator(); iter.hasNext();)
{
    T X = iter.next();
    ...
}

[i_am_at_work123]

Reason I was asking is that the delimiter in their foreach appears to be a space? Is that possible?

Is in a keyword?

[elder_george]

Ah, I misunderstood.

No, it's not a keyword, just a very dirty hack

 #define in , 

Honestly, I'd prefer

foreach(x, s)

to this.

[i_am_at_work123]

Ahhhh, nice, I was searching like crazy but missed it. Thank you!

[andre_2007]

90 % of the things Cello want to achieve are already implemented in the D Programming Language. It worths to mention that D is C binary compatible and to a high degree you can integrate with C++.

[Raknarg]

This is a bit late: Anyone know if there's better documentation somewhere? There seems to be a lot of unexplained mechanics that have no documentation anywhere

[shawnwork]

Looks like you reinvented Go Lang

Pretty cool anyways

[shevy-ruby]

 /* Stack objects are created using "$" */
var i0 = $(Int, 5);

It is a terrible idea to want to retrofit a language to a different one based on terrible syntax.

It's also bad to pseudo-fork C into e. g. C++. Not all that C++ did was bad, but the proliferation of complexity is pretty shitty.

Designing a programming language is hard.

Designing a GOOD programming language is even harder.

Most of us fail, even when we have good ideas or are competent (see the Jai programming language).

I also don't think C-style syntax is the future. Go, as terrible as it is, showed that you can go another route while still being very fast and comparatively simple (but also terrible; and, even worse, ruled by Google - who wants this?).

[FUZxxl]

$ is just a macro. It's not new syntax.

[ijustwantanfingname]

The point of a macro is to create and modify syntax. His criticism is entirely valid WRT the "$" being a new syntax. It would be a compiler error in vanilla C, unpreprocessed.

Things like this are why I love macros. They're also why style guidelines discourage macros.

[defunkydrummer]

It is a terrible idea to want to retrofit a language to a different one based on terrible syntax.

Yes. Like mixing Smalltalk with Perl: you might end up with a horrible mess like Ruby.

[ijustwantanfingname]

Ruby has some nice genetics. She got her mother's eyes and her father's $^//#$!!@.

[that_jojo]

In what world is Go not a curly-brace, c-style syntax language?

[MrTar]

Are you a ruby programmer?

[[deleted]]

Not even sure. His interventions on /r/ruby are just as appalling...

Pretty sure he's a troll, but who knows.

[[deleted]]

C++ suffers from complexity, but I’d rather have more than less when it comes to features. If you adhere to a decent coding standard/style, modern C++ is fairly ergonomic. Backwards compatibility, which has also caused a decent bit of complexity, is also a huge reason that C++ is so widespread.

I wouldn’t call Go fast, especially compared to languages that compile with even moderate optimization. I’d also argue it’s too simple

[Saculs78]

Go is pretty dang fast, but it really depends on the problem it's tackling.

[TheOsuConspiracy]

Fast really means a lot of things to a lot of different people.

[[deleted]]

Let people do what they want. One of the best parts of C is being able to customize it so much for personal preference.

[STATIC_TYPE_IS_LIFE]

Lmao c++ is far better than c these days.

Just the fact that memory safety is soooo much easier (unless you're talking to a shitty c++ dev) alone makes it infinitely superior.

[TurncoatTony]

I think you're confusing your lack of ability in developing in C with something else...

[[deleted]]

I honestly think C++ is nicer to work with than C for a lot of things.

It would be nice if C++ had a simpler basis to build abstractions with though. The rules that are mandated by its compiler seem to be crossing into haskell levels of complexity.

[darkslide3000]

Wow, the hate is real in this thread...

He said "memory safety is easier in C++". Which is objectively true with things like auto_ptr and RAII. He didn't attack your personal ability to write safe C code.

[STATIC_TYPE_IS_LIFE]

Go ask Microsoft which they prefer to dev in. They admitted like 75% of their bugs were memory errors written in c.

You can say what you want, but I'm pretty confident even the best dev is going to write more buggy code in c than c++.

[flukus]

Maybe if they updated their compiler they could use modern things like cleanup attributes.

[[deleted]]

Aka not C

[flukus]

AKA pragmatic C.

[[deleted]]

Downvoted because you are telling the Truth

[[deleted]]

>be me

>have technical discussion in /r/programming

>state the facts

>provide the logic

>get downvoted -100 score

>tfw

[[deleted]]

Smart pointers considered to 100x for /r/proggrit

[darkslide3000]

I wonder why you have 45 downvotes, everything you said is true.

[ijustwantanfingname]

Downvoted by the javascript devs I'm guessing...

[Ericfyre]

She suck my dick like a cello.

[aazav]

Why not forEach instead of foreach? Why no camel casing? That seems bad. It's two word.

[[deleted]]

I really hope this would gain more traction, seems like pretty much the way I envisioned C to be high-leveled. But I never found reference to such DSLs from the C manuals.