Chris Dragan's Corner

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep this blog more active. While my activity has been low during the year 2015, I have not abandoned the blog. I was simply spending most of my free time working on my personal project. In the mean time I’ve gathered several ideas for new posts, it will be great if these posts finally see the daylight this year!

Hopefully my personal project will also reach a publishable state this year. Here’s an interesting detail about this project.

C++ has been the primary programming language for me in my professional career. Over the years, I’ve used many programming paradigms provided by this versatile language. However, to the surprise of many, my new project is currently written in pure C!

Why C? Out of admiration for a coworker, who writes programs in C, which are of high quality, and which are readable, maintainable and extensible. And also as a personal challenge. Writing *good* quality software in C requires more skills than in C++, because the language is much simpler and doesn’t have mechanisms provided by C++, which help avoid certain classes of bugs. To be fair, I’ve seen a lot of bad C++ source code which fails to use these mechanisms, but that’s another story.

So here are my impressions about going back to C so far. First of all, RAII, which is the cornerstone of C++, is not available. This makes cleanup more tedious. Again to be fair, C++98 without lambdas also makes cleanup more tedious by requiring you to write or use classes just for the purpose of cleanup, which makes the code scattered or complicated. Secondly, handling error conditions in C is more tedious. Exceptions in C++ can provide a great way of signaling exceptional errors, if used carefully(!), together with RAII, which makes returning from functions easier without the need to babysit allocated resources. Mildly missed are classes, which can help to logically organize functions, although in many C++ programs they are abused by implementing unnecessary OO designs, which lead to too much boiler plate code and eventually hamper readability. One of the most missed features are container templates, which greatly simplify memory management in C++.

On the bright side, some of the advantages include better portability due to unencumbered linkage. Because the language is so simple, it also leads to simpler code, which can in turn be easier to read, maintain and extend, contingent on the type of program and the way in which it is written, of course!

Surprisingly, it is possible to write readable code in C without drowning it in macros! Many C projects I’ve seen overflow with macros, which impact readability. But this can be said about C++ projects, too.

Now back to the editor. Let us see what the New Year brings!