Switching to C over 'Modern' Programming Languages(devtails.xyz) |
Switching to C over 'Modern' Programming Languages(devtails.xyz) |
Rust exists for a reason, and it solves specific problems. That’s the “magic”, just like any abstraction in any language. So what’s the argument, that abstractions are bad? Clearly not:
> I also haven’t really experienced the problems Rust claims to be solving
This is like hearing someone say 20 years ago that “I’ve heard a lot of good things about PHP but I don’t see the point of it, because I’ve never had to write a web application that interfaces with a database” — well, no shit?
The very common thing I want to use in C is some sort of variable size string object. But no, I have to dynamically allocate a buffer that I know will be at least the right size for any text I ever put into it, or do I create a buffer that's the correct size for that string but re-alloc if I ever change it to a longer string. But then how do I store the buffer size? Do I want to create a struct that constains a point to the buffer and the length, or use sizeof() to calculate the string length? But then I can't use sizeof() if I pass that buffer into a function via a pointer. If I pass that string to a function is it being copied straight away or just storing the pointer so I can't change the string at a later date. I can't enforce copy semantics
And god forbid you ever forget to include space for the NULL
I just want a string I can dump some text in, I don't want to go searching for libraries, I don't want to have to consider allocation and copying and all that crap. If I wrote half of my boilerplate C code in python it would look just as simple and beautiful (if not more)
C gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. And rightfully so. It came out in a time when everyone was coding assembly. It's meant not to hold you back from doing voodoo with low-level stuff, therefore it won't hold your hand.
Not very practical in the world of today when we've been spoiled by 'better' languages and you need to quickly ship stuff that mostly works without worrying about the little things, but at the time it was revolutionary.
As a C programmer shouldn't you have a library abstracting all this by now? Either your own or one of the dozens available, including pascal-style strings?
struct strbuf { size_t cap, len; char *str; };
void sb_setf(struct allocator *a, struct strbuf *sb, const char *fmt, ...);
void sb_appendf(struct allocator *a, struct strbuf *sb, const char *fmt, ...);
// have other convenience functions for formatting fixed point values like "prefix AAA.BBB suffix" ("voltage: 7.23 V")
// special helpers for dates, times, etc.
Obviously, this isn't necessarily an improvement, but in theory you could do this:
size_t getlength( int m, char (*p) [m] ) { return sizeof *p; }
char mystring[] = "Hello";
getlength( sizeof mystring, &mystring )
It feels a bit like a speed run of C++, at least this took around 2 decades for people to get fed up and turn away ;)
(and interestingly, I also switched back to 'mostly C' for my hobby stuff, and I'm quite happy with it)
I've felt that way too, and it's been enough to push me away even as I've tried to build things in Rust in earnest. Along the same lines, I've found it hard to say exactly why I like C and super dislike C++. I guess I have to say it's simplicity--like I won't argue C is by itself simple (integer promotion by itself is not simple) but it's definitely simpler than C++, and the simplicity and power of its core conceit (everything is a number) is just enrapturing. I think it's just an ethos thing: Rust doesn't strive to be simple and I find that makes it impossible for it to delight me.
I also think that's broadly why newer languages have failed to capture the je ne sais quoi of C: you really can't get away with "everything is a number" these days.
If Rust was just C but with strong typing, a borrow checker and what would basically be suoer strong static analysis of pairing malloc() and free(), people would likely switch immediately.
But it isnt - its a whole different beast which by far is not perfect and repeats many issues it didnt need to repeat (e.g. terrible async like python).
Its just so good at having a compiler that tells you whats wrong that most of the other things are not that bad, and switching to Rust is likely good for 80%+ of C projects.
This is in a nutshell why I haven't switched to Rust. All I actually want is a small language like C, Go or Zig, but with compile time memory safety guarantees. Even if it means that a lot of 'dangerous' flexibility is removed or in an unsafe{} block (essentially a Rust--).
IMHO one problem with Rust is that it is moving too quickly into too many different directions, and as a result becoming a 'kitchen-sink language' in the tradition of C++.
Most of Rust's features interact in ways that aren't obvious. For example to get the basic memory safety guarantees that the borrow checker provides, you also need:
- the "no mutable aliasing" rule
- destructive move semantics and the Copy trait
- generic containers like Mutex and (probably?) generic enums like Option and Result
- thread safety traits like Send and Sync
- closures, and closure traits like FnOnce
Of course yes, you can have "safe C" without async, and Rust 1.0 shipped without async. But I think it's notable that The Book doesn't teach async. Most of the things The Book teaches are actually necessary for memory safety to work.
Not gonna lie, I don't see too much value in async, but that said, I can see where they (the Rust devs) are coming from. It was an oft requested feature, and it was in the pipeline for ages, leading to Rust dev burnout.
That said Rust team is working on making it fully usable, albeit the space of efficient, zero-cost abstraction closures that work with lifetimes is a set of one language - Rust.
Just write programs with your favorite language, if it is actually a “better “ one it will win, and you don’t annoy yourself and others by over promoting it. C did not start by building a evangelical strike force but bunch of programmers that actually wrote software that people have to use.
Given that this has been an argument for 3 decades or so, e.g. compared to C++ especially, I don't think so.
Even more so since C is not just some trendy language you pick up quickly, but needs quite a lot of time and effort to be profficcient in, to the point of appreciating its simplicity and portability/stability/etc benefits.
>Rust exists for a reason, and it solves specific problems.
Rust exists because its creators had a reason such a language was needed in mind. Doesn't mean others necessarily share it, or if they do, that they see Rust as the solution to the problem behind that reason.
It sounds to me like they keep learning languages with the same illusions and failing to take any lessons between their language exploration escapades.
All programming languages suck. It's just about finding the one that sucks the least for you (or your project/business).
They made the comparison of RPG characters and mentioned endgame frustrations. In my experience, C is the epitome of endgame frustrations (C++ maybe being worse, depending on codebases you work on); they've just yet to discover that
Very true, but C is the standard language on *nixes, so it's often the one that sucks less. It also strikes a good balance between mental burden and expressiveness for writing simple programs that aren't so trivial that they're just a shell script or one-liner. Rust is just too ugly and verbose to make it what I reach for to quickly hack out a throwaway utility with.
Maybe we are entering an era where C is cool again!
I understand most of the historical reasons why certain things in the language are the way they are, but some of those result in really bad ergonomics and counterintuitive behavior.
So simple and beautiful is not how I would describe C even if I would love it to be that way.
E.g., explain to me like I'm 10 why you think Rust is better than, say, D.
Rust blazes a whole new path, with the slightly different objective of safety. It's simple and lean, almost like C. It bakes in lessons learned over the years like inheritance being overly complicated, OOP generally being overly complicated, and how dangerous systems programming can be by having modules instead of classes, composition instead of inheritance, and memory safety as a default. It also broke the false dichotomy of "fast but dangerously leaky" or "slow but safely garbage collected" by introducing borrow checking and move semantics, allowing speed and safety with no garbage collection.
D feels like a continuation down an evolutionary dead end, like teleputer cartridges in Infinite Jest.
Rust feels like an innovative fresh start, like transferring digital DRM-free files.
(If you think that makes D sound charming, I agree. But realistically I would stick with Rust. :p)
But if say the foundation that supports it's development were to try asserting draconian control over it, many may reasonably be turned off.
I'll stick to C/C++ personally, rust does seem less flavor of the month but I can't get behind it if it's clear there are nutjobs at the helm.
These people (with rare exceptions) quite funnily never seem to have shipped some actual product or service based on those "simpler" languages. Or if they have it's shipping their parallel implementations of basic services that every language does better than C like strings, slices, data structures, etc. And no, if your code depends on cpp macro magic, it is not helping your point.
I'm glad I haven't switched though. Performance (which I'm measuring a ton of) is great. The situations where I wanted to bow out and take the 'easier' path were mostly bad design choices on my part and I think partly just laziness.
Rust forces me to think a little bit more, and I've really enjoyed learning about how/why the various language features were designed. Now I'm one of those damned Rust evangelists that have been annoying me for years =)
My reaction to that has always been that it forces us to think about the things we would have had to think anyways if we wanted to create reasonably reliable and secure software. So in the end if saves work, even if it doesn't appear like that at first.
The traditional solution is to have different languages for different code layers (e.g. a compiled language for the low level parts, and an interpreted scripting language for the high level parts), but this comes with its own set of problems.
But the C standard library is just awful. It's so inconsistent and full of quirks you just have to know. Like how some string functions allow you to specify a size, while others don't. And how strtok keeps track of an internal state and behaves differently on subsequent calls.
I wish there was a language that as simple and limited as C, but with modern (and portable) functions for things like strings, networking, graphics and so on.
This is very painfully true, but one 'killer feature' of C is that it is useful without ever using stdlib functions (except basics like memset, memcpy, ... which can be considered compiler builtins anyway).
In more recent languages (even C++) there is no such clear distinction between the language and stdlib any more, which IMHO is a real problem (e.g. most of C++'s problems are actually stdlib problems, not language problems).
I'm happy to use Python or JavaScript or something else when appropriate, but coming back to C++ is like sitting on your porch, enjoying a cool breeze and the relaxing after a hard day of juggling magic.
I feel the same way about these other languages, but for kind of the opposite reason! I write some code in the new language and then transpile it to C in my head just to see what I expect the CPU to be doing. I'm going through SICP right now and I find myself fighting the urge to imagine `cdr` as dereferencing the `next` pointer of a linked list. I spend a lot of time worrying about this stuff when writing other languages, probably to the detriment of my productivity.
I find understanding certain abstractions hard going because they don't mesh well with my view of the problem domain and my design for solution's implementation.
Whoah, I was convinced there is no way to write and run apps on these older iPhones - I wonder how difficult the whole process is.
Can't find current info on it online.
I am one of those that tried Rust, but guess back to C for my own projects. It's usually that I like to write smaller utilities and many quirks of C are not as painful. I like to write things that do not use dynamically allocated memory for example. Also plethora of available alternative C compilers for example something using QBE gives me a nice warm feeling. Yes, it is not all technical for me.
[1] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_sprintf.h
[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
Maybe combine them to make a Spring-like framework, but for C?
Long standing non-changing specs and standards should be married, and with children.
Being able to analyse the benefits of new tech at a distance (which is what the author is doing with their sterile toy projects) is not something that you can “fake until you make it”. It requires a lot of deep experience with different technologies, enough that you can pick up the common patterns of costs and benefits, which for the most part never change. This is exactly what OP is doing. Their big list of languages they’ve worked with is doing the opposite of what the author intends. All it says to me is that their bar is way too low, and that they do not understand the level of technological understanding required for a language’s inclusion in that list to mean absolutely anything in the context of this blog post.
In all I’m not really sure what the point of this post is. By the author’s own admission they haven’t worked with much C. If someone doesn’t understand the value in a language that addresses the memory safety footguns of C, I assume that they’re at best inexperienced, or at worst part of the quite sizeable contingent of C developers that are in complete denial about the language / standard library’s shortcomings, especially with regard to memory safety, because it’d require them to admit that they themselves are imperfect developers.
I didn't find the OP to be sure of themselves. See e.g.:
"Admittedly, this would slowly go away as I gained more experience with the language."
"This is likely because I haven’t spent enormous amounts of time in C/C++"
"I will probably come out on the other side with a lot of the same feelings about C as other languages."
"Maybe I will find the complicated syntax and rules of Rust are worth it."
I am highly skeptical that the author understands the full ramifications of undefined behavior, dangling pointers, platform-dependent integer sizes, and the myriad sharp edges of the C programming language.
I don't disagree that, for example, Rust has a heavy syntax. But those exist for a reason. Those are the result of hard-earned lessons from phenomena like double-free (see ownership) and duck-typed templates in C++ (see traits).
1) tokio, which uses unsafe{}, and/or
2) async functions requiring all calling functions to also be async
So, really, you can't avoid it. The ecosystem is built on the idea of NIH, which is fine, if it wasnt for so many rust features you can abuse so heavily (e.g. macros to make your own language that I then have to learn).
There are a lot of issues with the complexity Rust brings.
If you’re extremely lucky, things will compile and work.
If you’re just lucky things won’t compile, and you’ll have to write conversion functions (or macros).
If you’re unlucky, there will be subtle differences, likely poorly documented, between the libraries, and code will compile but have subtle bugs.
Of course, other languages have that problem, too, but at the higher level of json parsers or graphics libraries, not at the basic level of strings, lists, or maps.
Overall, C++ can be great choice, but it often times results in not being due to lack of rigorous discipline by everyone involved on the project.
It's a bit philosophical whether that's a problem of the tool or the craftsman, but I think it's usually a bit of both.
The rationale for using Rust over C that I see published the most is "memory safety". But I can write small C programs for text-processing using flex that do not manually manipulate memory. What benefit would there be to write them in Rust.
I've written more in C than in any other language (and I've written in dozens of languages professionally over the past 25 years). But the one thing that gets hammered home with every line of C I write is this: You're playing with a loaded gun.
The more code there is, the more likely it is that you have subtle heisenbugs that break in mysterious ways. My current job requires C (for a number of good reasons), and I really notice the jump in crazy, hard-to-track bugs despite my DECADES of experience as a careful, expert C programmer.
C is "simple" because all of the complexity gets pushed to the compiler behaviour and runtime environment. You don't even discover how many assumptions you've been making until you have years of experience under your belt.
Rust’s compiler is slightly slower than many other languages (as it simply does more), but it’s not a significant degree where you would need some monster machine..
This is easily solved by writing a large Pong application in Rust.
Essentially the processor reads a while bunch of instructions at once, splits each in the raw microinstructions, arranges them in a graph of dependencies, and then solves an optimization problem to find the best way to schedule nodes from that graph onto its internal execution pipelines. In real-world execution, you can't even tell what assembly instruction(s ) are the ones being executed at a partocular time - disparate parts of various instructions. Some instructions, like "mov ax, 0", don't even execute: they just serve to mark which the tens of real registers is now free to use for another symbolic register like bx.
No matter what the cpu does internally to arrive at producing the requested output from the supplied instructions, it DOES produce exactly the reqested and expected output from the given instructions.
What it does not do is for example maybe a + operator doesn't mean the same thing after some unknowable prior step changed the definition of +, or flatly not provide a means to manipulate some data in a way that a language author thought was crazy and no one could ever have a valid reason to do $thing like idk execute a string or something. Sure there are now optional settings and features you could consciously use, for example to enforce that data/exec seperation, but it doesn't just do it by it's own magic according to someone else's rules instead of your own code.
Even assembly itself has symbols and labels, which are themselves abstractions.
Of course assembly is an abstraction, but it is the lowest level programming language that ordinary mortals can still write code in, which was the point the GP was making.
Exactly nobody writes applications in microcode. Register aliasing and speculative execution have under normal circumstances no effect other than some performance which if the CPU just did as it was told by the assembly code (or actually, the machine code, the binary representation of the possibly optimized assembly) would still work exactly as advertised. You can also switch those off if they're features of the assembler, and if the CPU does them then you're going to have to live with it.
If you really wanted to make the point that Assembly is an abstraction then macros would have probably been a better thing to mention.
You think C is "low level", but it was once considered "high level", and the compiler does many things you don't want, and the standard's ambiguously-worded, and implementers have their own interpretations about the ambiguity, and also bugs in their compilers, and you eventually arrive at:
"If you really want those instructions to happen in this function, without fear of magic, write them in assembly."
C's position in the "low- vs high-level" hierarchy arguable hasn't changed much since it was created. There were already higher level languages in the 60's (e.g. languages which abstracted the underlying hardware much more than C, but those weren't useful for writing an operating system in).
This was before my time, but I think it's a common misconception (only true for operating system development). When C was created, there was already Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Algol, Simula, BASIC... and SmallTalk and Prolog were just around the corner - and most of those are much higher level than C).
...interesting that you mention that, I think that functions and structs are the essential 'core abstraction tools' that get you to at least 80% of any higher level abstractions that were invented since then, and this is exactly the reason why C is still quite popular. Its feature set is just enough to be considered a high level language which enables abstractions, but not more (especially no fads and fashions that came and disappeared again).
It is a urban myth that C was the first one, usually pushed by naturally UNIX folks.
JOVIAL, ESPOL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/S, PL.8, PL/M, Bliss, Mesa, Modula-2, VMS Basic, VMS Pascal,...
If this was intended to illustrate the unexpected consequences of undefined behavior it succeeded remarkably well!
eg. C leaves the case of exceeding the size of an int undefined. In most cases it has a predictable effect on modern, mostly similar architectures but that is by no means guaranteed, and forcing an architecture to calculate overflow a particular way seems like a negative.
That being said, everyone has a pet example of a compiler doing some really odd and deep optimisations - I suspect that’s mostly due to successive layers and optimisers adding up to have unexpected effects, rather than a deliberate effort by compiler writers - but I’m no expert on the matter.
Section 4. Conformance says "A strictly conforming program shall only use those features of the language and library specified in this International Standard. It shall not produce output dependent on any unspecified, undefined, or implementation-defined behavior, and shall not exceed any implementation limit."
Compilers are not allowed to produce output dependent on UB for strictly conforming ISO C programs, they must optimize those statements out. Treating UB as impossible is required for ISO C. It's NOT required for GNU C, or Clang C, or Microsoft Visual C, but they usually do so anyway (even though they're not compiling strictly conforming ISO C programs).
I will utterly kill all humor by explaining it:
They made a funny observation about a thing that happens. The thing that happens is (today) called UB. The funny observation is that that comment kind of exhibited the outward appearance of what the effects of UB could look like.
It began reciting one metaphore, "enough rope to hang yourself" but mid-way unexpectedly switched to a different metaphore "shoot yourself in the foot", producing a combined invalid nonsensical output. As though a program suffered some UB in the routine for looking up and printing metaphores.
The comment author might have done it on purpose. Maybe they intended to make exactly that joke.
The history of the term UB has no more bearing than the history of any of the other words used.
Expect to hear from @pjmlp on this!
The long term cost of those decisions as well as the number of really bad bugs (and security issues) that can be traced back to one-off code is likely much larger than the same figure for well used libraries. But it all sort of evens out whenever a bug in such a library is found because then it is so widespread that lots of systems will suffer.
Weird how that works.
Well, not sure about the LISP programmers, but C programmers have a good reason: they work under different environments (from embedded to Windows, legacy UNIX, the latest Ubuntu, ...) and also have different needs, regarding allocation, string management, etc. So one-size-fits-all lib might not cut it for everybody. It can also be as simple as having an inherited codebase which uses something else.
Still, there are popular string libraries, and C programmers do use them when they can.
The only problem is C is simply not expressive enough to have proper abstractions like that.
I don't think C consistently lives up to this principle:
- In the memory model, even simple integers can hold "poison" values.
- Pointers usually behave like integer addresses, but in the memory model they have "provenance" (edit: spelling), and they also have to follow "strict aliasing" rules.
- Signed integer overflow is UB. We could ignore integer promotion rules most of the time, if not for this restriction.
- Even simple integer assignment isn't simple when an integer is shared between threads. Atomic orderings are hilariously complicated.
I worry that a lot of people who find delight in C just...aren't aware of these rules? Or maybe aren't consistently aware? Or maybe are aware but think that some violations are benign?
- whoa cool everything is a number! Make that light blink, wipe that SDRAM chip, whiz bang!
- What the fuck is a torn read (insert any C gotcha in here)?! Everything is garbage!
- I know, I'll encapsulate "The right way to do things" in a library/new language.
- Never mind, I've decided to build websites (insert popular tech job here) for a living, but be super grouchy about it
The corollary to "I think Rust's complexity makes it impossible to delight me" is "I think C's brittleness makes it impossible to delight me." It has notes of innocence lost, nostalgia, a "simpler time", etc. Are those days gone forever, as the Dan say? Dunno.
(and actually: yes, some rules are benign if the major compilers agree on the same non-standard behaviour, so far I have never seen unions used for type punning break in C++ for instance - it's good that C++ now offers a 'proper' alternative though).
It's pretty much an illusion that any non-trivial C or C++ program can be entirely standard compliant, it always depends on the specific compilers it has been tested with - which is still a better situation than Rust, which only has a single implementation (so far).
Isn’t the rust solution to wrap Q&D/experimental code in “unsafe {}”? I think that’s superior for the parts where you don’t need the fast iterations of an interpreter.
One other 'modern' solution is to use a compiled language for the whole 'stack', but with a hot code reload solution, so you can change the code on the running game - which also tremendously reduces turnaround times.
Previously they would write in something like C/C++ or use the JVM but try to avoid all garbage collection events though very carefully avoiding allocations, etc.
For them, Rust is a gift!
Also: memory fragmentation is only an issue if you don't have a proper memory management strategy (which you absolute need in any non-trivial code base, even in GC'ed languages).
Besides the issue of security, performance is also a thing. If you’re trying to squeeze every last cycle out of your program then you need to understand CPU cache hierarchies at the very least. That’s at a level far below assembly language, digging down into the physical layout of the machine.
You could make the same, useless, argument about the raw binary. If you looked at an executable you are still actually only looking at a transcoded representation in ascii in an editor. The cpu doesn't actually know what 0A is, those are glyphs for numbers and letters in a human language.
Assembler mnemonics are not materially different, and even macros don't change this because the macros are macros, built out of other visible assembler not hidden magic.
You are not conducting useful argument or communication with this silliness.
They do hide things. There are often multiple ways to encode a line of assembly into machine code. For example on x86, JMP can take an 8-, 16-, or 32-bit displacement, and the assembler will usually select the shortest encodable variant. Some instructions have a shorter variant for certain registers, like ADD $1, %eax. You add useless REX prefixes.
The cpu magic doesn't do things you didn't ask for, or can't figure out how to ask for through a bunch of indirection.
All the cpu magic means is that you don't know how it did exactly what you expected. It still produced exactly and only the expected output from the given input.
High level language magic means it does things you didn't expect, and that you can have a hard time figuring out how to get it to do something you want if that doesn't happen to be one of the things the language designers predicted and decided for you that you should ever need to do.
I just move atoms until the program I desire is on the computer.
I prefer the latter definition, as the former is, while objective, quite useless. The second definition could be expanded by a partial order between languages by “feature X can be emulated in it” with some caveats[1], and then we might even get Rust/C++ beat C for low-levelness, since C don’t have any way to force vectorization (compiler-specific intrinsics don’t count!).
[1] since most languages employ FFI/linking, not even this definition is too specific — would probably have to write it as the “idiomatic language can emulate feature”
...which unfounded assertion would that be? As far as I'm aware there are no contenders which would even attempt to throw tools like Maya, 3DSMax, Blender, ... from their throne. And all those tools hail from the 90's.
The only exception in recent time which gained some traction might be Figma for 2D design, but even though it runs in browsers the important parts are also written in C++.
std::string_view would have been a good thing if it hadn't added another memory corruption foot gun.
A universal string type is one of those things where you can either have convenience or performance, but never both.
And/or you need a crate like alloc, heapless, etc.
For the sake of a sprintf "abstraction"...
Everything else, however, cannot.
Their industry uses are highly different as well. C is almost a requirement for embedded systems, and while C++/Rust can be used there, they’re simply too complex and in Rust’s case additionally too young to be adopted. C++, and possibly Rust (if it can get its act together), are more used in high level programming, as that’s what they’re built for.
If C++ could do what C can, then why is the Linux kernel 98.5% C code? Wouldn’t it be better to use a more varied and powerful language?
Or, maybe different languages have different use cases and cannot be directly slotted in to replace one another.
What does language complexity has to do with anything? It will get compiled down to machine code, and both can be and are used for embedded. They occupy the exact same low-level niche as C, hell, they may be even more level as they can also do things like SIMD.
Linux kernel is C because Linus doesn’t like C++, it’s that easy. And usually no, why would you use multiple languages in a project if you don’t have a good reason?
Sure, it's possible (you can write C in C++, for the most part, and to its credit, C++ has placement new). But many of C++'s niceties require memory allocation, making much of its value-add over C questionable.
As a result to some extent GCC and Clang are also compilers for some sort of "Linux C" which is strongly reminiscent of the ISO standard language but distinct.
And there's no reason you would choose C++ for a project where you'd otherwise use C on account of the (exaggerated) relationship between the two languages, the reason you'd do it would be that you want C++ features, and Linus doesn't want C++ features. Projects to "just" compile the existing Linux code but with C++ compilers failed AFAIK.
And maybe this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477113.3487274
(I agree though that the C standard isn't actually relevant in the real world, most C compilers treat it more or less as a 'suggestion', unless enforced with options like '-pedantic')
The first version used preprocessor macro tricks for generatic code, basically what Go folks re-discovered with //go:generate, we already had it in 1992.
BIDS 2.0 already used templates.
It was exactly because even C++ for MS-DOS provided safer library than C, that I was never that into C. It wasn't better than TP in features and safety, only in portability, and that I could get from C++ anyway.