[Nix-dev] Why C? If so how is the best way to have simple lists ?

Marc Weber marco-oweber at gmx.de
Sat Jun 8 15:41:29 CEST 2013


Excerpts from Bram Moolenaar's message of Sat Jun 08 12:56:38 +0200 2013:
> C++ is incredibly complex.
I didn't ask about introducing all kinds of odities. I know that doing
C++ proberly takes 2 years or more studying C++.

Now you can shoot yourself into your feet using any language.
I just want "sane collections" - and C++ seems to provide them.

That's why I consider using a C++ subset to be an option.

With zimbu I see one issue: Is it possible to rewirte "one collection
list" only which will be found in many files?

I guess you have to rewrite the whole .c file using zimbu then.

This would also force everybody to learn zimbu. While I may agree that
its "yet another nice language" - eg like gnome's vala - I'm not sure
its the easiest way to go. It would mean rewriting vim using zimbu
partially.

I mainly care about introducing some threading.

Eg node has also written a 'libvu' abstracting over some issues.
I'm not primarly a C programmer (even though I know what pointers are,
and that I left Delphi long time ago because there were untyped lists
only)

Also libnih (from upstart) provides some simple list like iterators, and
much more - I think even dbus integration.

I don't want to read/write/review/debug list code. We have 2013.
That's why I wonder what is best for the project.

Eg for the buffer list case - who cares whether you're using a plain
array, or a linked list? Who has more than 2000 items? And till 2000
items a simple array (and increasing array size by 50% always) should be
equally fast - if not faster, because less mallocs have to be done.

I also know about the yzis project (vim as component rewritten in C++).
But its community is not that strong -  and they support only lua (which
would not be that bad). While I made it compile the project looked
almost dead to me.

Marc Weber


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