Dependable C (dependablec.org)

There are many problems with this website. I couldn't actually find the meat of it, where the intro page talked about what it could do for us.

Inconsistent titles, stuff labelled [TOC].

It might be a work in progress and not really ready to be shared widely.

> C isn't not a high level assembler

Hmm.

The text following this heading seems to take the opposite view. I suspect this is a typo.

However, I think the heading is accurate as written. The "C is not a high level assembler" crowd, in my view, is making a category error, conflating C itself with an ISO standard and abstract machine concept coming decades later.

By the same token, "C is a high level assembler" is a gross oversimplification.

"C isn't not a high level assembler" indeed.

This is reminiscent of Orthodox C++ [0], though I think it's perhaps more similar in goal than intent.

[0]: https://bkaradzic.github.io/posts/orthodoxc++/

There was also "boringcc"

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/boringcc

As a boring platform for the portable parts of boring crypto software, I'd like to see a free C compiler that clearly defines, and permanently commits to, carefully designed semantics for everything that's labeled "undefined" or "unspecified" or implementation-defined" in the C "standard" (DJ Bernstein)

And yeah I feel this:

The only thing stopping gcc from becoming the desired boringcc is to find the people willing to do the work.

(Because OSH has shopt --set strict:all, which is "boring bash". Not many people understand the corners well enough to disallow them - https://oils.pub/ )

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And Proposal for a Friendly Dialect of C (2014)

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180

Wow, lots of C related posts in the last few days. Is that because of vibecoders rediscovering it?

Is there a way to force reader mode or force text not to be justified like that? I'm having a difficult time reading the content (on mobile at least).

Honestly as a hobbyist programmer I'm more interested in knowing which exact platforms/compilers that don't support the non-dependable patterns and why should I care about them. Even better if the author can host a list of "supported platforms" that's guaranteed to work if people's projects invest in the style.

The idea is interesting but unfortunately the actual articles are riddled with spelling errors, typos, missing words, sentences that cut off before

And so on. Is this a work-in-progress thing not meant for public consumption yet?

So basically back to C89... I'm not a fan since the changes in C99 made the language significantly more convenient, more enjoyable and actually safer, and even the MSVC C frontend has a nearly complete C99 implementation since around 2015 (the parts of C99 that matter anyway).

Case in point: the article has this somewhere in the example code:

    struct struct s;
    s.member = 42;
    s.other_member = 1138;

(ignore the syntax errors and typos, the article is full of them)

If new members are added to the struct, you end up with uninitialized memory. With C99 designated init at least the new members are zero-initialized.