[Info-vax] C... the only winning move is not to play...

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-02-14, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:
>
> Some would say that C doesn't have any sense of style at all.
>
> It is surely no coincidence that the rise in the popularity of C came in the
> same timeframe as that of the term "computer nerd" :-)
>

Unfortunately, the rise of C is kind of a self-fulfilling feedback loop
as, given that it's available on such a wide range of platforms (and may
even be the only viable higher level[*] language option), means that more
and more people use it and hence it becomes yet more popular.

For example, I've got a couple of bare metal projects I am working on
this weekend and the code for those is written in C (and a bit of ARM
assembly language) because it's the most viable option especially as
some of the common code in support libraries runs on a range of
8-bit/32-bit architectures.

Ada is available (in various subset forms) for some bare metal ARM work,
but the freely available tools do not have the maturity the C tools have,
or the range of different architecture options, unless you are willing to
pay mega-pounds and/or mega-dollars to have them developed or do the work
yourself.

Doing the work myself would be a interesting, but major, project and
since I already have hobbyist projects I want to implement, the end
result is that I tend to use C to implement those bare metal projects.

Simon.

[*] PS: Note I said "higher level", not "high level". :-)

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world