“int main or something like that…”

I’ve never been one to actually concoct a new years’ resolution, but if I had to decide upon one, it would probably to finally learn C and Assembly after all these years.

I’ve started with reading “Effective C, 2nd Edition” (Robert C. Seacord) and “The Art of ARM Assembly” (Randall Hyde). My general opinion on “Effective C” so far is that the book definitely acts as a pretty good reference, and warns against bad practices, but sometimes it will pull out concepts that have not been introduced yet out of thin air. A good example is, the book will often pull out tricks like preprocessor directives (think, #define, #include), but the chapter on the C preprocessor is near the end of the book. I mean, I already know those things from having skimmed over C before, but from the perspective of a beginner, this is confusing because things like macros look exactly like functions.

Additionally, the book lacks any kind of interesting exercises with C to pique your interest. There is a lot of talk about the little details to make portable (as in, cross-compiling) applications and how to make them safe, and how to avoid undefined behaviour, and it is definitely useful because I definitely learned somethings that I didn’t know about floating point and integer representation, especially in C, but all this talk of details kind of lacks purpose if there is no practical application. I feel like this book was designed more as a reference over anything else, and if that was the case, then perhaps “Effective C” shouldn’t have been the book’s title.

Other languages that I am used to, like Rust or JavaScript, usually have you import things by way of some special syntax like use file::{function, class, whatever}, but in C, you use the C preprocessor to append whatever you want to include to the top of your file. It’s definitely simpler, but it also raises problems like accidentally shadowing something that I didn’t even know I imported.

One thing that kind of interests me with C is just how bare-bones it is. I mean, everyone describes it as THE bare-bones language, but I didn’t realize that it’d be so barebones to the point of having no namespaces and a completely flat structure. Having to write my own data structures that dynamically allocate memory is kind of fun, but also exposes the weakness of the language. Pointers are dangerous things, and accidentally messing up pointer arithmetic often has invisible consequences that will only come back to bite you hundreds (or worse, thousands) of lines of code later.

The experience of learning C overall has been relatively entertaining, but also kind of dry. The language lacks any “exciting” features like tagged enums or pattern matching, you can’t even iterate over collections like arrays. At the same time, this experience has provided valuable insight into how the foundation of our tech stack works.