C and Modern C whats new
Though C was not the first programming language I started writing computer programs (I began with 8085 Assembly, COBOL, FoxPro, FORTRAN). I started C dev back in 1998, though it was welcome change initially the most puzzling part was pointer manipulation, I must say it took some time to really understand how this works in-memory manipulation & management.
Today, after being in software development for more than 2 decades I see that C is still relevant and used. I, now mostly develop Web Applications so not coding much of C, though in my existing projects we have implemented a couple of for loops in C for better performance and optimization which one can call from Perl/Python/Java modules or any other programming API’s. So now the question comes that why I am talking about C in my blog?
Well, last week I was listening to a podcast on my fav SE radio channel regarding Modern C. I really loved the episode as that gives me good progress report of C development. The podcast guest and author of the Modern C book by Jens Gustedt has given amazing insights on C standardizations. Just a brief about Jens, Author of the Modern C book, former co-editor of the C standard document ISO/IEC 9899:2018 and a senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA)
He was talking about why people still use C, what is classed as Modern C, what is legacy C, and what has changed in the past 50 years in the C world. They also talked about standardized, Threads (the modern way), memory management, programmers vs compilers, security coding, casting, ecosystems, embedded C. They also mention about GCC and small C lib Musl libc and how companies optimize their compiler for optimization also best practices and what you should do in your C career as a software engineer.
Just finished listening to this interview. Such great insight on C dev and future. I am not sure if my current project requires it but definitely with Modern C, I will check my options whenever the need arises.
in the end, I really touched by your philosophy of publishing as a free book.
I would strongly recommend listening to this podcast.
Links:
Happy Coding and learning.