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Ask HN: Know some Good C programming communities?

17 points by leakbang ↗ HN
I'm on the journey of developing a web-browser from scratch in C and I keep coming across niche questions on how certain libraries function (Xlib). I did some searches, but I couldn't find any forum or community that was recently active. Do you know of active communities that have Knowledge of C/Xlib?

25 comments

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mc4ndr3
The C++ Slack team has much C knowledge.
leakbang
It's a shame that they are on Slack, but thanks I will check them out!
tus666
What is the background of this project? Is it a learning exercise or aiming for some functional benefit?
leakbang
The aim of the project is to create a useful, minimal, and fast web browser. But we all are learning as we are developing it :D
0x20cowboy
Would love to contribute. Especially if it’s Javascript free. Any plans to open source?
leakbang
Yeah the browser is open source, but the project is very early in development. After the project has a stable basis, we will fully embrace the FOSS mindset and make contributions open.
zzo38computer
If it is FOSS, I think it will be necessary, since many modern web browsers have many problems. Will you be able to write extensions to the browser in C? Would have many feature assuming advanced users only? If so, that would be an improvement, I think.
leakbang
The project is still very early on in development so we haven't decided how to handle extensions/add-ons. But it would definitely be neat and unique if the browser extensions are also written in C. But the idea behind the browser is to create an unbloated, fast, and responsive browser that is also easy to use.
2143
It's cool that you're doing this.

Why not Rust?

leakbang
I evaluated a lot of languages before settling down on C. I have 2 main reasons why I chose C. One is that I wanted to pay homage to many great programmers who wrote industry-pushing software in C. The other reason was that I wanted to start from 'scratch' and use as few pre-made libraries as possible. I think there is a lot of fun in starting a project like this from 0 and figuring out everything on the go :D
2143
Rust is rather low level, yet it offers memory safety.

> One is that I wanted to pay homage to many great programmers who wrote industry-pushing software in C.

Some of those great programmers might probably have chosen other languages if they existed back then.

Anyway, I think what you're doing is pretty cool and I wish you all the success in whatever language you choose to do this in.

leakbang
Thank you for the advice and the good wishes :)
sigstoat
what conceivable use could you have for xlib?

you’re going to have ten thousand hard problems related to just CSS. do yourself a favor and at least use a high level cross platform gui library.

leakbang
The high level GUI toolkits that I looked at (GTK+ and Qt) were very bloated with features that would not come in handy for my use case, and frankly, they were difficult to use. Doing simple tasks in Xlib was simpler. But I did quickly notice a lot of limitations with Xlib such as no transparent pixels which means no Anti aliasing and the lack of ability to load in True type and Open type fonts. I did come across the Xrender library (also by XOrg) but couldn't find any documentation for it. Also doesn't really help that pretty much any documentation for Xlib is dozens of years old. Which (C) GUI libraries do you have in mind?
zzo38computer
I agree; I really dislike GTK+. However, you could use Xt and/or Xaw, which are OK in my opinion (although there are no transparent pixels, etc; but if you need them, then you might possibly draw your own stuff in the document area).
leakbang
I'll look into Xt and Xaw. Thanks
sigstoat
> Also doesn't really help that pretty much any documentation for Xlib is dozens of years old.

it hasn't changed in dozens of years! what do you expect? somebody sitting around refreshing graphical design for docs on a library you shouldn't use, so that people feel better about using it? you shouldn't be using it!

> frankly, they were difficult to use

try making a combo box with Xlib.

> Doing simple tasks in Xlib was simpler

pro-tip: simple tasks are simple. worry about how difficult the difficult tasks will be.

emmo
Handmade Network[1] is probably where you want to be. They have a semi-active forum, and a very active Discord.

[1] http://handmade.network

leakbang
This looks great! Thanks a lot!
rurban
GitHub has some, but there are also gitlab, codeberg, srt, a.s.o.

C folks prefer to talk in code.

leakbang
That's a good insight! I'll definitely try to look for them on Github and similar platforms. Thanks!
janekg
comp.lang.c ;-)
leakbang
Thanks +1 I did't know Google Groups were still around!