Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjmlp 18 days ago
Is writing compilers, linkers, database servers, HPC and HFT platforms, OS drivers, networking stacks at IP level, considered systems programming accordign to you, or are they plain business software?
1 comments

I said, I avoid, I don't love, I was talking about preference. And I'll state: Most of these are written mostly like I say. Please find serious counter-examples.
A cursory glance to the ones that are publicly available shows otherwise.
You must be talking about Linux, the BSDs, sqlite, postgres, gcc, the mold linker, or let's take some new kids on the block: raddebugger, FilePilot, TaskSlinger?
I am for example talking about LLVM and GCC, used to compile all those examples.

Living in the past? GCC has long adopted C++, last time it compiled with a pure C compiler was back in 2011 thereabouts, not cross-checking the exact year.

A few trees don't make a forest.

Actually care to open GCC and see what I mean? Check the newest commits and see what they do. Maybe you're living in a dream world where some magic language features do the work for you. Meanwhile people out in the field do actual work by just pushing bytes at the low level.
To use the developers own words,

> Necessary to bootstrap GCC. GCC 5.4 or newer has sufficient support for used C++14 features.

> Versions of GCC prior to 15 allow bootstrapping with an ISO C++11 compiler, versions prior to 10.5 allow bootstrapping with an ISO C++98 compiler, and versions prior to 4.8 allow bootstrapping with an ISO C89 compiler.

> If you need to build an intermediate version of GCC in order to bootstrap current GCC, consider GCC 9.5: it can build the current D compiler, and was also the version that declared C++17 support stable.

https://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html

So yeah, if you want to enjoy GCC 4.8...

Now I can bother to show exactly each source file, but Github search is relatively easy to use on the mirror source code.