Why I Use C | Prime Reacts 

Turned 3 mins video into 13 mins, is this guy the best react streamer or what

Prime might be a web dev, but we all know hes moving towards C/C++

Wait, did Prime just subtly endorse the practice of quiche eating? Revoke this man's x86 Assembly license immediately!

After 40 years in IT as a reseller and now retired, I wanted to warm up my old hobby - programming. After two years of C++, I realized, that I'm not compatible with C++ and ended with C and it's great. When memory management and logic goes hand in hand, I just love it.

Because it's the offical lingua franca of programming

C is still the closest thing to cross-platform assembly. I also love the simplicity of the language, and it shows with how small and fast its compilers are. I only wish it had better tooling, as something like cargo really speeds up development.

The best skill to have as a programmer is understanding code someone else wrote

The reason I use C (and Odin, because it’s philosophy is the same) is because it doesn’t get in my way when I code. That’s it. It is so much easier to reason about my code when I don’t have 50 different features to think about, all polluting my mental model.

That's the reason I love programming in Common Lisp. You can start fairly abstract, but go down to machine level when you need to.

After trying out many languages (including Rust and Zig) I’ve also found that I strangely really enjoy C. There’s much less to keep in your head and with some good technique and knowledge of what you’re doing it’s very gratifying.

What some people miss about the undefined behavior in C is that much of it is a feature, not a bug in the spec. C deliberately has some UB to allow compilers to optimize on architectures that behave differently at a fundamental level. For example, AVR and PIC microcontrollers and certain RTOSes will not panic when dereferencing a null pointer. I've worked with some microcontrollers, like the TI MPS430, that actually initialize uninitialized variables. Not everything is ARM or x86. C's stance to define this as UB means that compilers can make the correct decision depending on the OS and hardware. Reading forums of competing programing languages, you'd get the impression that undefined behavior in C is a pernicious and capricious bug in the specification itself. It's not. It's quite deliberate. All this being said, languages that eliminate this UB and prescribe standards across hardware are limiting their optimizeability across different architectures and, imo, are unlikely to replace C as the common systems programming substrate.

The dichotomy you describe between drive to mastery and drive to get paid seems like it has a middle ground that I strive for that could be described as a drive to accomplish a task well and efficiently for the satisfaction of it.

"all you need is a bunch of nand gates" Better yet, all you need is a bunch of transistors.

Wait until you start implementing high level concepts within the C preprocessor Because no language feels closer at home than your own personal (it's readable to you) macro spaghetti

People always pushing stuff further and further. In almost everything. Examples are the economic growth, your piano skills or your rizz skills - idk. Sometimes there is no need. Have a nice day.

10:28 Do love those filters and ranges. Haven't written a boomer loop in anything but simple examples made readable for people unfamiliar with algorithms, in a long time.

1:45 In youtube you can press '

Try embedded development, the only abstraction you have is the startup code that calls your main function. Also working with memory you understand how the computer works. interrupts are another thing that allows you to demistify what happens at the processor level. also you need to study the specific controller's architecture.

What I like in C is that premature optimisation actually works. In other languages it simply fails due its unfriendly nature to the compiler or interpreter. C is much clearer on what is fast. I think the slowness of other languages is mostly due to knowing what is fast in that language. Often when you write code, we tend to use the most simple way, so we use language provided things, but those are often slower than writing the code with more basic things. So sugar is the devil and we can't stop using it due its charming simplicity. C simply doesn't have that option, you are forced to write the function with basic blocks. That way C code is often faster.

8:40 - This is a really important thing for you to have called out, imo. I was feeling super burned out for _years_ of corporate software work; spending most "dev time" on cloud configurations, using a random mix of languages for every project, spending tons of time upgrading frameworks or switching to new ones because web development paradigms and "best practices" change every year or two... it's all so draining and soulless. Then I finally made myself do a project I'd been wanting to do for years - get back into making a game engine, combined with wanting to make it work for Web-Assembly for various reasons. Was originally going to use Rust, but learning two new things while already dealing with burnout was... not working. Eventually went with C and with the arbitrary deadline of a game jam, I managed to start the project and actually get into it again. Because of it, this is the first year in almost a decade where I've actually been _enjoying_ coding again.

prime was talking real to the new gen of programmers real talk at the end there , gr8 vid

I don't know if I'm too dumb to realise i'm doing things wrong or if I never did something that actually required me knowing how to use them, but I never had issues with pointers in C

I am a first year electrical engineering student and i had a 1 semester cource on C. It was some of the most fun that ive had learning and it sparked a desire to continue studying programming. There's something so special about starting from a blank file and bit by bit implementing a complex program that languages like java have yet to show me, but then again I'm comparing apples to oranges

What you said ab the level of abstraction hidden from you even when using C is so right. And that part about having more control being a pain sometimes is true depending on the scope of a project, the amount of heap/dynamic allocs my current project makes always makes me think "yo this sh*t is dangerous" altough thanks to arenas and defer pretty much solve it for me but still its risky. Im by no means a beginner but damn i still dont know a lot, im 700 lines into a compiler/language ive chosen to write (in zig btw) when i have the time & i realize just how much ive taken for granted. Im not even at the code gen part, was considering native asm but i think llvm ir or qbe would be a more sane option. the tokenizer i wrote is great, its 500 lines & works flawlessly & is fast. the parser however is another story, its works but is a mess & needs to be revised plus im using a map to resolve vars at runtime, pretty sure there are better ways to do this. At this point, the language already has the ability to resolve identifiers into values, booleans, floats & ints of numerous bases (namely 2, 8, 10 & 16, coz were programmers, these are the only ones that truly matter, in any case they all evaluate to base 10 at run time) the parser also has the ability to evaluate binary arith operations/expressions with numerous operands even when an operand is actually a nested expression, altough there is no precedence and is left-associative for now. However if im being honest with myself, the implementation of the parser is so dumb & the amount of branches the program takes is probably enough to grow an actual physical tree 😂 There are many functions/methods which use both recursion and loops at the same time + ive added so many constraints into the syntax of the language such as prefixing ids with $ or @ to ease the process. @ is supposed to reference global symbols either "imported" from zig std or c std or simply provided out of the box. Got the idea from llvm ir & zig too. theres still so much left to do such as adding that feature and by the time im done itll probably be well over 1000+ loc & hopefully ill come out more knowledgeable once its completed but more importantly, be able to accomplish my goals for this project. I dont think there is a necessarily a "best" language, in fact im at a point where i enjoy as many languages as possible, i used to be like this guy but for me it was c++ but i appreciate the more modern languages available nowadays. After all, its nice to have a change of language once every while coz 4 the most part the basics stay the same & it should always be a joy to program, skill issues suck but there really is no easy way to get good if you dont have inherent talent for this.

I don't often have an opportunity to write C, but when I do, I enjoy it. And often it is still the best tool for the job.

Because B isn’t commercially available?

I’m a former frontend engineer and currently learning C, so this really resonates with me. As he mentioned, I can’t resist my inner drive to be a mastery, however inefficient it does feel like.

Hey Prime, what are your thoughts on SVG and HTMX . Use a SVG editor to design the page and all its elements, and have HTMX be the event handler

The cool thing about coding on old hardware like a commodore 64 is that you store ram data in actual memory addresses that reflect spots the physical chip.

G. K. Chesterton reference dropped, subscribe button slammed.

"Assembly is smaller" spoken truly like someone who hasn't written a line of x86 assembly in their life.

why did prime flashbang us at the end for no reason

The most fun I have programming is writing C for microcontrollers. There's something about poking bits around memory and they actually live right where I put them. Generally I don't even use heap alloc, just allocating static blocks and using a simple memory manager. It's miles away from my daily work.

G.K. Chesterton mentioned!

"The more Control you have, the more Pain you have" dayumm real.

I'm not a programmer yet, but I watch a ton of stuff about languages. Your way of talking about it makes the most sense to me. What is the deal the Rust's safety? Is it one of these overly abstracted things? How important is it really? I noticed Zig has 4 "build modes". Good? . . . Great?

*Real Talk* How do you use Zig with Embedded/Microcontrollers ?

there are useful, well crafted, abstractions. And there is Vercel and Next.js

4:13 this. C _feels_ like it’s a direct translation of the assembly into a little bit more friendly and universal language. But in reality we got caching, pipelineing, branching probability dependent pipeline prefetching, hyper threading etc etc on top of that we have compiler optimizations In reality much much more is happening under the hood, that is abstracted away into a black box so the cpu acts like we think it should.

Lmao, i imagined having myself programming my current problem with gates and i chuckled 😋

Take Zig and Rust togheter.

There must be a psychology thing to the level of abstraction you prefer too.

I started watching about C. It’s interesting to learn the foundation to these other languages. Kinda provides you context to what has been developed to give you better methods, less complexity..

When you were talking about how tiny and how difficult it is to make mechanical watches, optical lithography for modern cpu production came to mind and seemed pretty hard too. .. soooo tiny

what a way to start a video

It sounds like the abstraction level he likes the most is “memory and logical operations”

10:22 You gotta love how in the list of features that C++ has and C doesn't, he put designated initializers which were ported from C99 to C++20. C did that first bro. EDIT: char8_t is in C23. Another not C++ exclusive.

People thinking C is the perfect representation of the machine should look up microcode, and as primeagen says, compiler magic.

what book is that at 1:12?

rust has an insanely nice package manager that bundles everything up nicely AND includes all dependencies, but adds heaps of abstraction c has no package manager, and you need to do slightly more complex builds on top of installing libraries just to get a binary, but it lets you have lots of control both are a double edged sword, there is no one programming language that can do everything flawlessly because there is no perfect language, and either way you are going to make sacrifices

Prime's body is a machine which turns 3 min video into 13 min video

What should I be inferring from the fact that the only representations of themself (?) that they put in this video are an anime avatar and someone wearing nitrile gloves with taped shut boiler suit sleeves to accomplish basic tasks? I feel like interacting with this person will lead to waking up naked in a basement chained to a metal pipe.

I'm of 2 extremes: Ruby for complex object-basedness (not mererly OO); and clean C for compact UNIX-like CLI tools, as well as the occasional Ruby-hot-spot speedup. GDB, the GNU debugger (and the Godbolt website) brings it all together for me: it lets me single-step through the produced assembly code. Beautiful.

2:20 Said another way, you'd have to be a TimepieceMaster. ;)

The points in the video are fair and well elaborated. As a programmer and an artist I say it feels good to go back to simpler things (but not always for me). People who hate on other languages for no reasonable argument are the worst. I am currently using JavaScript mainly but I enjoy using other languages and have used them on different projects. So far I've used JS (and TS), C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, Python and even Assembly (had too much fun with this one). I really liked (and disliked) some of them but if anyone asks me why would I use a language over another for a certain project, I believe I have the minimum required knowledge to have a fair judgement and give a good reason. People just need to remember: they are all tools and all tools come with good and bad things.

7:30 - on the whole thing with Zig and the ?*var syntax to denote a pointer as "could be null"... ...that's just the difference between pointers and references. C++ has this feature, pointers are pointers that can be null. References are pointers that, for all intents and purposes, are non-null.

One of the things I dislike about the move away from exposing pointers to the programmer is that data structures where pointers are the most natural representation, like linked list and trees, actually become more confusing. This is one of the areas where I think go really excels. I honestly don't think I fully comprehended the link list until I implemented them with pointers in go.

C is not assembler. People think it is without realizing how much you can't actually do in C. I once wrote a compiler that generated assembler code, that couldn't be replicated in C. It was just a different calling convention but that is enough. Also the amount of optimization that occurs is crazy and the generated code might be fairly different. Finally other languages, such as Rust, actually generate assembly that is equally close to the code as C does.

Nike - Just do something 😂

So I was really interested in learning machine language and it is interesting to me that it reminds me somewhat of languages like spanish and german that the opcode changes based on certain circumstances it is really beautiful you wouldn't rrally understand why in certain areas the assembler generated what without context. I believe context is huge helps understand what is really going on.

Mechanical watches are the graphql of timekeeping

3:55 now that just a skill issue, i use C# but i go out of my way to know how every most of it works, how the CLR handles the IL etc, i scoured the documentation for a lot of time until i could understand what i wanted, i went deep in a lot of parts, safe for how does the CLR compile the IL into machine code cause for me going that far isnt nessesary, if you are using something but dont dive in, of course its gonna be a big black box.

GK Chesterton mentioned

I went from machine code to assembly, then C way back and never got into the newer toy programming languages. I want to focus on solving the actual engineering problems instead. I always thought that wasting so much time on the latest shiny programming languages was like focusing on the telescope instead of the stars and galaxies you were supposed to observe.

I don't like or wear watches, but I appreciate the level of art and craft.

09:28 - Spoke like a true quiche eater!

I love C. I don't use it in practical applications, but it's very fun to use in easy to medium Leetcode problems.

Primeagen just got pumped bc the guy is pumped. 😂 jokes apart, it’s nice that we have different programming preferences bc we need this, we need different communities exploring different problems, imagine if everyone is playing javascript from now on, what happens with all other projects that is more suitable to other languages? Embbeded systems, OSs? So, lets celebrate the “diversity”

I think a grand goal comprised of smaller goals is the golden medium

I love mechanical watches. It's awesome to see an old German man putting tiny, fragile pieces together to make something we take for granite (pun).

I cracked and went to C (definitely not c++), because it allows me to learn, but also I realize there are a lot of gotchas with it. So, it makes a great learning and exploratory language, but it seems like a terrible option for actually building stuff. A great discovery and prototyping or proof of concept tool, but building I think the abstracting those gotchas away, after you are aware of them is what you want. The concern and critique of the video, is that, yes, if building something yourself, it is probably more enjoyable and satisfying. When other people are potentially going to change your stuff, you work on a team, that all introduces a lot more variables and levels of complexity that I think make C not the best tool for that type of scenario. Not that a team can't build in C, but it would probably require a whole different model of collaboration than the tools made with that in mind like it sounds more modern tools are like Zig and Rust (Neither of which I am familiar with, especially not Zig yet, but I like pointers, so who knows)

the primagen life and professional takes are always from the point of view of a well versed, smart and lucky man. those doesn't apply for all people following.

You should run through some old classic tales like the Story of Mel.

it’s a mazoterica harmony

the bit about white paper was a solid joke

With great power, comes great trouble.

Multi Core! Boom 💥! - Amy

I will try again zig when it will start to be stable and not provide braking changes in every single sub version. When I m building products I need stability. the other are just experiments

Still think C + zig build tools is the best combo

„Giving yourself more control, but it comes at a cost of time“ Uses NeoVim and writes own Plugins

Just wish C had some new features: namespaces, better built-in memory tools, auto pointers, type aware macros, automated #include guarding, pre and post handlers bound to procedures, etc.

Interesting, I prefer going the other way. I.e. starting with Math and REDUCING the abstractions, i.e. functional programming. That said, it depends what project you're building and who you're building with. This video really only applies to hobby projects where you have control over those things.

I think that C's influence on hardware has been underestimated, as well. Look at the 8-bit world and how those assembly languages are architected. Then when you get to 16-bit and later (remember, C came about in the 1970s) you can see, even in extended ISAs like the x86, how instructions and architecture were added that can arguably be at least in support of C, if not more directly influenced. Then get to the load/store architectures and see how well their assembly languages and architecture map to C.

He's so afraid of exposure that he's treating this like he's living in a nuclear fallout zone.

I'm at 0:00, looking forward to seeing Prime's reaction to the video, which I believe is called "Why I don't Use Zig"

That's one thing I dislike about some platforms. Because of the framework switching, it's hard to really become the master of one

5:58 watch the clock tick as the pendulum swings

Haskell mentioned lol

I got good at C and it made me pretty good at every other language I found out. Because I played "the farmer was replaced" and accidentally learned python in like an hour.

Any programming language is better than web server config files. Even debugging isn't the same because the feedback is invisible until you check.

The Grand Daddy of pretty much ALL modern languages! All hail C!!!

Yes, CPUs are complex blackboxes. Programs segfaults without just memory barriers in particular place in assembler code...

I spent more time fixing broken debian installations than arch ones, so I don't know about that time saving thing. If you don't want to customize it that much just install Gnome DE and be done with it. 90% of it will work out of the box. The missing 10% I don't care to fix, because I never use.

9:45, I would say that this is C++, compared to C. Kind ugly on a 1st glance, but offering plenty of tools, still precise. Higher level ones would be an electronic canvas, with a gross line, loosing drawing area as a supposedly necessary price to pay for the technology. C is like the spaceship used to go to the Moon: 1 can deeply admire it and its achievement, but he/she should also realize that it would never reach Mars.

I prefer C. But I do want more. I want classes and inline closures. Swift gives me those but makes you jump through too many hoops to use pointers. C++ gives me those but the closure syntax is a mess. JavaScript gives me those but the prototype syntax is tedious to simulate classes but it probably has the most transparent closures.

I agree that C strikes a good balance between knowing what the computer really does and being able to program it efficiently. But yeah, obviously there's a ton of compiler magic, there's the abstraction provided by the OS itself, there's crazy hardware optimizations, there's crazy CPU firmware optimizations, there's even non-deterministic neural branch prediction. But we can't un-abstract those, this level of complexity is still required for current level of performance. While in case of a lot of languages, abstraction causes loss of performance, so C strikes the right balance there as well.

I love C, it’s the best language to me ! Rust is interesting though, mostly because giving more information to the compiler enables more powerful optimisations… but I think C could add similar things, and become way more powerful than Rust in the end.

Why hear?

That analogy with the paper kinda sucked IMO. Sticking with it, I think lambda calculus would be the pen and paper and using Asm would be more like using all of those unnecessary utensils

I LOVE c its the best. I am writing a compiler for a toy lang right now.