As great as this looks, I think it should heavily emphasize moving on to using GCC (or maybe LLVM).
I learned C in the mid nineties using a copy of Visual C++ 1.0 that a friend had gotten from his father (and probably he got it from work). It was the only compiler I knew of and once I was ready to move beyond toy programs, I was seriously hampered by the fact that this compiler couldn't produce text mode executables (any call to printf opened its own new window that definitely wasn't cmd.exe) and it couldn't set the graphics mode for blitting pixels. It was heavily oriented around this new fangled MFC thing but I was a teenager so I wanted to program games not business apps or whatever. That meant I wanted text mode or graphics mode.
My high school CS class had Borland C++ and I could set mode 0x13 with that in DOS. But I had no way of obtaining this compiler as a kid. And it probably didn't work on Windows 95 anyway.
Anyways, it wasn't until the early 2000s that I finally learned about GCC, a free as in beer and freedom compiler and the simplicity of it would have been amazing for learning.. If only I had known.
codr7 29 minutes ago [-]
I stole my copy of Borland C++ from school.
But as mesmerized as I was by C++ at the time, Borland Pascal was a lot more fun to play around with. I remember unsuccessfully trying to wrap my head around the different kinds of pointers, and the humble beginnings of std.
auselen 5 hours ago [-]
Probably same years… whenever we got a new computer I was removing OS shipped and installing a previous MS OS. Win3.1? Nah I want DOS, win95 nah… I want 3.1. That’s where my tools were.
Funny thing I still use win10.
lgiordano_notte 1 hours ago [-]
funny how much the tools you first get comfortable with shape everything after. even today, setting up a simple clean c environment is way harder than it should be for beginners. tutorials like this help, but eventually pointing people toward gcc or clang early on makes a huge difference long term.
> Defined using char, int, short, long or long long
> Note that C does not have a boolean type
`_Bool` and `long long` are both introduced in C99, this is mixed up info.
Edit: probably tailor-made for old MSVC, which didn't support _Bool until VS2013.
PaulRobinson 5 hours ago [-]
Ironic that you've drawn the eye to the thing that needs to be front and center of any C tutorial, and also the thing that makes C so tricky to work with.
When somebody says "This program is written in C", my initial thought is "Which C?". There is no one, single C.
I don't write C daily. Heck, I don't write it monthly any more. And so my grey cells are struggling with which versions introduced what, and you've spotted something I would have missed on a first read.
And this is a problem.
Can you list all the undefined behaviours, and which language features came into which version across ANSI, C99, C11, C17 and C23? The last one feels a little brighter in my mind, but I definitely can't, and if I was writing a C tutorial - like many that have been written - I'd probably be explicit about choosing a version and sticking with it, and good luck and godspeed to everything outside that version.
Of course this is one of the reasons learning C is harder than other languages, and why languages like Zig and Odin have a decent chance: ergonomically simpler than Rust, all the power and flexibility, (much) less of the head scratching.
card_zero 5 hours ago [-]
Because Zig et al won't have future versions with new features?
PaulRobinson 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but C predates semantic versioning and is rammed with undefined behaviour that a lot of people depend on.
Modern languages - even those that have high levels of C interop like Zig - can (and do) avoid those problems.
jononor 4 hours ago [-]
Of course. But they are starting with 40 years less baggage. And can reasonably assume a modern hardware architecture, for example.
uecker 2 hours ago [-]
You could also just use the newest C standard. I would personally trust that C23 code written today still works in ten years and still has excelelnt support in compilers a lot more than that this is the case for any code written in Zig, Odin, or Rust.
PaulRobinson 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, but then you have potential interop and portability issues. C11 isn't yet universally adopted, and there are some dark corners out there where even ANSI (C89/C90) is not quite embraced and original K&R is holding out.
I think the jury is out on Zig and Odin (but I like Zig a lot, in particular), but I feel Rust has hit a tipping point - like Go, Python and Java - where there's too much production code out there for it to disappear in the next ten years.
If you were to ask me about languages where that might not be the case in ten years, I'd point to where usage is not very production oriented (R, Julia), or where people have had a good try and decided they want to pull back investment (anecdotally, Ruby and Scala seem to be on that curve right now).
uecker 2 hours ago [-]
Nothing really disappears, the question is how strong the ecosystem is in ten years and how good the support for the code you write today. Rust will not go away but I doubt that the code written today still works without hassle or that all the 1000 crates it depends on still exist. That there are dark corners using C89 or K&R is not a weakness, it demonstrates how strong the C ecosystem is. If you write something in Zig or Rust now, you need to realize that in 10 years it might also be considered ugly legacy code, even if you think it is shiny modern code today. The question is then if it is as easy as using "gcc -std=c89" to work with it.
larfus 2 hours ago [-]
Had a bunch of inconsistencies last time i checked. Not quite comprehensive nor does it have much clarity. I also could hardly see when I disabled my ad block momentarily.
Moral of the story: books are better for learning when it comes to C.
4 hours ago [-]
anovikov 6 hours ago [-]
Unbearable with ads all around.
commandersaki 2 hours ago [-]
The interactive editor seems to only use a quarter of the screen space and isn't resizable. Quite vexing to use.
kubb 3 hours ago [-]
Good luck to the author with the tutorial. I'm really beginning to accept that despite all of the new languages, like Rust and Zig being available, they won't be able to displace C for the next couple of decades at least. A good programmer will need to learn all the techniques for working with C code safely, efficiently and reliably, with all the inconveniences that implies.
doublerabbit 3 hours ago [-]
Most older C developers I've spoken to find Go and Python as a fresh breath of air and refuse to head back.
The younger generations totally sideline C completely.
Myself a non-coder but experienced SysAdmin who can write cool Perl, TCL scripts, C almost feels almost natural when reading it. I just haven't had the time available to dive in.
It could be that I was exposed to it at 14 (2003) but chose perl because MSN/Y!M/AOL messenger bots were the discord bots of today. Still, eager to dive in. Some reason Java too.
8 hours ago [-]
doublerabbit 3 hours ago [-]
The issue I always find with these tutorials that they never seem explain the finer details.
On the Array Page:
/* print the 7th number from the array, which has an index of 6 */
printf("The 7th number in the array is %d", numbers[6]);
There is no mention of what %d is or does. Once you know, it's fine, it's the display placeholder for the variable but that's what throws me off on tutorials.
We should call things free software if they're free software and open source if they're not. Also, what's this cookie consent dialog about? Are those 999 business partners open source?
throw432196 11 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
arcmechanica 5 hours ago [-]
no thanks
Rendered at 12:52:52 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I learned C in the mid nineties using a copy of Visual C++ 1.0 that a friend had gotten from his father (and probably he got it from work). It was the only compiler I knew of and once I was ready to move beyond toy programs, I was seriously hampered by the fact that this compiler couldn't produce text mode executables (any call to printf opened its own new window that definitely wasn't cmd.exe) and it couldn't set the graphics mode for blitting pixels. It was heavily oriented around this new fangled MFC thing but I was a teenager so I wanted to program games not business apps or whatever. That meant I wanted text mode or graphics mode.
My high school CS class had Borland C++ and I could set mode 0x13 with that in DOS. But I had no way of obtaining this compiler as a kid. And it probably didn't work on Windows 95 anyway.
Anyways, it wasn't until the early 2000s that I finally learned about GCC, a free as in beer and freedom compiler and the simplicity of it would have been amazing for learning.. If only I had known.
But as mesmerized as I was by C++ at the time, Borland Pascal was a lot more fun to play around with. I remember unsuccessfully trying to wrap my head around the different kinds of pointers, and the humble beginnings of std.
Funny thing I still use win10.
> Note that C does not have a boolean type
`_Bool` and `long long` are both introduced in C99, this is mixed up info.
Edit: probably tailor-made for old MSVC, which didn't support _Bool until VS2013.
When somebody says "This program is written in C", my initial thought is "Which C?". There is no one, single C.
I don't write C daily. Heck, I don't write it monthly any more. And so my grey cells are struggling with which versions introduced what, and you've spotted something I would have missed on a first read.
And this is a problem.
Can you list all the undefined behaviours, and which language features came into which version across ANSI, C99, C11, C17 and C23? The last one feels a little brighter in my mind, but I definitely can't, and if I was writing a C tutorial - like many that have been written - I'd probably be explicit about choosing a version and sticking with it, and good luck and godspeed to everything outside that version.
Of course this is one of the reasons learning C is harder than other languages, and why languages like Zig and Odin have a decent chance: ergonomically simpler than Rust, all the power and flexibility, (much) less of the head scratching.
Modern languages - even those that have high levels of C interop like Zig - can (and do) avoid those problems.
I think the jury is out on Zig and Odin (but I like Zig a lot, in particular), but I feel Rust has hit a tipping point - like Go, Python and Java - where there's too much production code out there for it to disappear in the next ten years.
If you were to ask me about languages where that might not be the case in ten years, I'd point to where usage is not very production oriented (R, Julia), or where people have had a good try and decided they want to pull back investment (anecdotally, Ruby and Scala seem to be on that curve right now).
Moral of the story: books are better for learning when it comes to C.
The younger generations totally sideline C completely.
Myself a non-coder but experienced SysAdmin who can write cool Perl, TCL scripts, C almost feels almost natural when reading it. I just haven't had the time available to dive in.
It could be that I was exposed to it at 14 (2003) but chose perl because MSN/Y!M/AOL messenger bots were the discord bots of today. Still, eager to dive in. Some reason Java too.
On the Array Page:
/* print the 7th number from the array, which has an index of 6 */
printf("The 7th number in the array is %d", numbers[6]);
There is no mention of what %d is or does. Once you know, it's fine, it's the display placeholder for the variable but that's what throws me off on tutorials.