Comment on The C programming language is like debating a philosopher and Python is like debating someone who ate an edible

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DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Assembly isn’t really faster than C in many cases, although it is in some cases, C actually compiles to assembly basically. The speed ups you get from assembly come from the fact that you can hand optimize some things that compilers miss, and it can be useful sometimes, like when writing a very high performance part of software like a game rendering loop or something.

Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.

Memory leaks are an issue with all programming languages, although some use what’s called a garbage collector to handle memory which can be okay with some things but terrible in other things like real time software, operating systems, video games, or just anything you don’t want to hitch and lag and run like a turd. Garbage collectors aren’t some magic fix to memory management, if so they would be a part of C. There are huge tradeoffs to not managing your own memory. If you are using c with objects, then you are pretty safe. The object oriented nature of the language makes it very easy to manage memory. That’s mostly what it’s there for besides reducing the amount of redundant code, if you are using inheritance like you are supposed to. This is called a node graph. You store your data under objects so when you want to remove your data you just call a recursive free function on the highest parent object.

The difference really is that C code is efficient, in the sense that it doesn’t waste anything. Every thing that seems low level about C is there for a reason. It came from a time where it was important to write code efficiently. Where every MB and cycle counted. Where having a garbage collector freeing and potentially crashing your operating system was unacceptable as well as extremely slow. It’s still slow btw, because programs have scaled with the ability of hardware to run it, so garbage collectors are still mostly as terrible as they always have been.

C is only low level in the sense that it actually runs on the hardware. There isn’t layers of stuff in-between it and the hardware. There is no good reason to do so, outside of maybe security in some context. You don’t want web resources running on your hardware directly.

All the other stuff that comes with modern languages is mostly nonsense. Type checking is for lazy programmers. It multiplies the time needed to do an operation. There is no good reason for it to exist other than programmers being bad at their job. C is loosely typed btw. It checks types in the compiler where it belongs. If your android phone was written in c++, your battery would last for days, and you could play games on it for hours, and everything would be extremely fast, nearly instant loading of stuff. The reason we pages were written in JiT languages was mainly just for comparability across many different types of hardware and browsers. They were also relatively small programs. Scripting can be useful sometimes, garbage collectors can be useful for script kitty stuff. It has no place in mainstream software and definitely not in operating systems. Google went from “Don’t be evil” to let’s build an entire operating system out of java and spyware. It’s not good. At this rate we aren’t even going to have guis anymore in 10 years because no hardware will be able to run it without destroying itself, and needing to be plugged in constantly, and $1000 worth of ram.

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