“I know”, I say, “I’ll use C - it’s been around for fifty years, it’s small and simple and got to be polished to a sheen by now.” Then I read an article like this one.

Which, you will note, is not about C. It’s about its standard library.

I know, I know. In practice a programming language isn’t just syntax and semantics, it’s also the standard library, the tools, the third party libraries, the package managers, the community, the entire freaking ecosystem. With C however, you can save yourself quite a bit of trouble if you avoid the standard library as much as you can, be extremely picky about your dependencies, then vendor and statically link pretty much everything.

Many depressing articles would suddenly be irrelevant to you if you did that. In this case, all you have to do is parse those numbers yourself. It’s work, but at least you can escape most of the madness.

score 1 · canonical