• uservoid1@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    3 months ago

    How are they going to tackle heavy use of the C preprocessor?

    What about pointer arithmetic without decorating everything with “unsafe”? As the whole point is making the code safer.

    • killingspark@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      3 months ago

      What about pointer arithmetic without decorating everything with “unsafe”? As the whole point is making the code safer.

      The point is to reduce the amount of work by doing the boring work automatically. Manually copying struct definitions, functions, etc etc would be very boring but error prone work which is kind of the worst combination.

      If that’s done you can start improving the codebase module by module.

    • pelya@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      3 months ago

      I guess it will translate the majority of the code which does not contain unsafe parts, and leave the pointer manipulation for manual rewrite.

    • lad@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      3 months ago

      you can just wrap a whole C code into a macro

      yeah, preprocessor is going to blow everything, I forgot how good it is. Maybe there’s a way by preprocessing and then leaving it as the code, but that wouldn’t be as useful and configurable

      • killingspark@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 months ago

        Rust also has powerful macros, are you sure that those can’t mimic at least most uses of the preprocessor?

        • lad@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          3 months ago

          You’re right, but:

          • Rust goes out of the way to make macro safer and less error-prone, which means it will not be able to cover exactly the same especially in some fringe hacky cases
          • I was commenting along the lines of automatically converting one into another, I find it will either be very difficult or outright impossible without human rewriting the macro from ground up (that is, if we know what problem it solved in the very beginning, otherwise it quickly would become guessing game)
          • killingspark@feddit.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            3 months ago

            There is the project c2rust which is being used to transpile c projects to rust. I didn’t find any mentions on restrictions in this regard but I obviously agree it’s a complicated issue.

            , which means it will not be able to cover exactly the same especially in some fringe hacky cases

            I’m just not sure this is true. Maybe you and I just don’t see that there is always an equivalent solution in rust macros even if it’s going to be unconventional/unidiomatic use of rust macros?

            • lad@programming.dev
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              3 months ago

              Maybe you and I just don’t see that there is always an equivalent solution in rust macros even if it’s going to be unconventional/unidiomatic use

              Maybe so, but large part of where it will be impossible is reproducing bugs introduced by unsanitized macros in C /half joking