[jjoonathan]

C arrays suck on the best of days and qsort requires that you understand function pointers and types which are some of the hairiest C syntax in common use. The C Clockwise Spiral rule is truly special.

It's easy to lose sight of the climb once you're at the top.

[devnullbrain]

I'd suspect kernel devs know about function pointers.

[jjoonathan]

I'd expect kernel devs to carry lots of bad habits and poorly calibrated intuition from their noob days. Example: "for loops are fine."

[sgerenser]

What’s wrong with for loops?

[jjoonathan]

They encourage accidentally quadratic behavior if they are easier than calling sort().

[JohnFen]

Well, we could debate this, but it's all irrelevant to the assertion that C makes it hard to use good libraries.

[jjoonathan]

Oh, right, I forgot that C's library/package management situation sucks so hard that makes the awful syntax look like a comparatively small problem.

[JohnFen]

This actually made me laugh out loud. Yes, if your problem with C is that it doesn't need a package management mechanism like some other languages, then C is clearly not for you. But C is very far from the only language like this.

It's a bit like criticizing a fish for having no legs.

[IshKebab]

> if your problem with C is that it doesn't need a package management mechanism like some other languages

The problem isn't that it doesn't need one, it's that it doesn't have one. I have no idea why you would think that it doesn't need one.

Well there is vcpkg now anyway so it finally does have one.

[JohnFen]

I sense that we have some sort of real miscommunication going on here, because the only response I can think of to

> I have no idea why you would think that it doesn't need one.

Is that I have no idea why anyone would think that it does need one.

Perhaps the disconnect is that you are wishing C addresses different use cases than it addresses? That you wish it were a different language? If so, that's fine. Use a more appropriate language for your task. I just find it odd if the criticism of C is that it isn't a different kind of language.

[IshKebab]

> Is that I have no idea why anyone would think that it does need one.

For the same reason any language needs one. What is it about C that you think excludes it from the basic requirement of "using third party libraries"?

[cozzyd]

C package management works great on my system.

  # dnf install foo-devel

[IshKebab]

That's suboptimal for many reasons. Package names are not consistent. Installing multiple versions is usually impossible. Huge pain for library authors. Doesn't integrate with build systems usually (even basic pkg-config support is iffy). The command is OS-specific. You can't usually choose the linking method. Difficult to bundle dependencies. Usually out of date. Etc. etc.

[cozzyd]

it works quite well in practice, and unlike pip things don't break every 2 weeks.

[asveikau]

A lot of these comments are like "C is hard if you don't know C and it scares you".

Not to mention kernel mode doesn't want a gigantic library package manager to pull in leftpad() from the internet. As mentioned, the kernel libraries on FreeBSD have a qsort, but they didn't in the original commit from 3 decades ago or whatever.