Java vs C++ vs C – Infrastructure Technology Advantages

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I have been going through interview questions and I saw one which made me stop and think for a while. It starts with a quote and asks about your interpretation and whether you agree or not.

"For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace." – Dennis Ritchie

From a bit of background reading you can find that he was the mastermind behind C language as well as the UNIX OS. At the time it was a phenomenal improvement and at the forefront of cutting edge techniques. I feel that C++ and Java are becoming increasingly popular languages, but C will always be an important language.

What do other languages offer when it comes to infrastructure technology that could indicate its advantage over C in the future. On a side note, does anybody know which year this quote was made? I just want the opinions of people who use these languages a lot, I myself use python language and would love to learn a bit more about the framework around C and it's importance firsthand.

Best Answer

For all of its advantages, C is an unsafe language; it lacks many of the safety guarantees that other languages have, such as:

Array bounds checking
Type safety
Garbage collection (to avoid memory leaks)

Despite these disadvantages, C is "closer to the metal," making it a very high-performing language, and offering real-time performance guarantees. This is why it is often used to write kernels and device drivers, where performance really matters.

In reality, the most important part of an operating system (it's "kernel") is quite small; it can be written in C, while most of the other parts of the OS could be written in a more "modern" language.

Related Solutions

C++ – The “blub paradox” and c++

Well, since you mentioned Haskell:

Pattern Matching. I find pattern matching to be much easier to read and write. Consider the definition of map and think about how it would be implemented in a language without pattern matching.
```
map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map f [] = []
map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs
```
The type system. It can be a pain sometimes but it is extremely helpful. You have to program with it to really understand it and how many bugs it catches. Also, referential transparency is wonderful. It only becomes apparent after programming in Haskell for a while how many bugs are caused by managing state in an imperative language.
Functional programming in general. Using maps and folds instead of iteration. Recursion. It's about thinking at a higher level.
Lazy evaluation. Again it's about thinking at a higher level and letting the system handle evaluation.
Cabal, packages, and modules. Having Cabal download packages for me is much more convenient than finding source code, writing a makefile, etc. Being able to import only certain names is much better than essentially having all the source files dumped together then compiled.

C Programming – Purpose of Arrays When Pointers Could Do the Job

Arrays are contiguous memory created on the stack. You can't guarantee contiguous stack memory without this syntactic sugar, and even if you could, you'd have to allocate a separate pointer in order to be able to do the pointer arithmetic (unless you wanted to do *(&foo + x), which I'm not sure but it might violate l-value semantics, but is at least quite awkward, and would scream out for some kind of syntactic sugar). Design-wise, it also is a form of encapsulation, since you can refer to the collection with a single identifier (which would otherwise require a separate pointer). And even if you could allocate them contiguously and allocated a separate pointer to reference them, you'd have either int fooForSomething, fooForSomethingElse... which forces a fair amount of creativity as your collection grows, so you might think to simplify with int foo1, foo2 ..., which looks just like an array but is harder to maintain.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C++ – The “blub paradox” and c++

C Programming – Purpose of Arrays When Pointers Could Do the Job

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