And IRL I know that I will never use C because it will probably never be the right tool for what I have to do

why would use a C program to make a request to an API!!

And I compared it to node because that's what I know the best, but most "modern" languages would be similar I guess

sadness.png

I don't want to handle memory allocation to extract a value from a JSON file

But whatever, that's maybe because I'm a young noob-level programmer

my final thingy https://github.com/angristan/openfoodfact-api-c

@angristan What's the depressing bit :D

@angristan Using C for that makes 0 sense... :( But at least it's curl 'easy' cleanup. Imagine what hard cleanup is.

@caseyp

@angristan *starts thinking of wile hacks to avoid memory management*

@angristan
knowing how to do these things will help you, though. it's important to keep in mind, even in higher-level languages, when operations will need lots of allocations, because allocations are one of the biggest performance bottlenecks

@shmibs indeed

@angristan Yeah it's definitely cause C is so bad.

After years of changing requirements, eventually you realize that your app is leaking every possible kind of resource, this is the magic of deep C

@CharredStencil @angristan That might also be an indicator of "your" programming skills.

@steelman @angristan My manager skill says that I don't have to use a language that makes the programmer do a compiler's job.

@CharredStencil @steelman @angristan This is a valid point of view.

@angristan At least for this case, Rust is shorter.

And people use Rust for writing OS kernel too. 🤔

@angristan yeah that really doesn't make a lot of sense :v

@ivesen School projects™

@angristan yeah, there are many good uses of C, but making a request to a web API and parsing the resulting JSON is not one of them.

It's sad that many teachers can't come up with tasks that show strengths of C, and then the students suffer and get to think C is a bad language.

@Wolf480pl @angristan Calling HTTP APIs is a terrible use for C. However, there are thousands, if not millions, of lines of C that make JavaScript work at all. What C is really good for is writing high-performance JavaScript interpreters, without which those 18 lines of node aren't going very far.

@angristan Dude, C is awesome. It's great for being able to know what your code is actually doing on your machine.

@ethicsperoxide @angristan Nowadays even X86 and ARM machine codes are translated again in CPU. 🥺

@veer66 @angristan That's a good point. There is a limit to how close to the bare metal you can get with C (or, sadly, even assembler). But at least C will teach you about (virtual) memory and pointers and system calls.

@ethicsperoxide @angristan I suppose that coding in C on 8051 to interface PM2.5 sensor and E-Ink display is more practical than this cURL thing.

@shadowfacts

@angristan @shadowfacts Can you use any library in C?

@angristan every once in a while the world needs something like Node.js to appear. And it wouldn't be possible if the folks didn't know their memory management

@tdemin yes