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Atari Scene News @[email protected] · 2026-04-05 · 16:15 UTC

Koppers 64, work in progress game for #AtariJaguar console https://youtu.be/b5eOdwOs5ic #atari

#atarijaguar #atari

navi @[email protected] · 2026-03-15 · 19:13 UTC

as the basis of the language, modern c by jans gustedt[1] is great – if you already know the basics of c, skimming it works nicely

in general i’m not exactly sure what parts to focus on since it’s more like, a lot of small things, than a few big ones – so i’ll write down a few that come to mind, and feel free to ask about those or anything else

imo modern tooling and good api design are the best points of writing modern c

gcc’s -fanalyzer or clang’s -analyze, runtime debug tooling like asan or ubsan (-fsanitize=address, -fsanitize=bounds), valgrind, etc

if you’re writing for posix, there’s plenty of newer apis that help making tasks less painful, getline, asprintf, are two i end up using a lot

do avoid inventing syntax with macros that are hard to read, and apis that are hard to follow the flow, think about memory ownership when designing apis

i usually avoid opaque structs with getters and setters, making structs public is not as big of a deal as most people say

i also usually try to structure my code in the most self-documenting way i can, e.g. i like doing void foo(size_t count, int some_array[static count]); over void foo(int *some_array, size_t count); – both tooling and developers can make use of the self-documenting syntax

here’s a bit of a showcase about bounds safety: https://uecker.codeberg.page/2025-07-09.html

c11’s _Generic and anonymous structures are great, the latter specifically makes writing tagged unions a lot simpler:

struct foo {
    enum {
        FOO_NYA,
        FOO_MEW,
        FOO_BOOP,
    } type;
    union {
        struct nya nya;
        struct mew mew;
        struct boop boop;
    };
};

switch on foo.type, and then access foo.nya, foo.mew, or foo.boop

designated initializers are great, use them, for the example above you could do:

struct foo foo = {
    .type = FOO_NYA,
    .nya = nya_default(),
};

c23 adds [[deprecated(reason)]], and you can use it to emulate private fields in structs if you want, by going

#ifndef MY_LIB
#    define my_lib_private [[deprecated("private field")]]
#endif

defer is getting a proper technical specification soon, which means a published official spec and if implementation experience with the spec goes well, then it’ll be part of the next C standard – the latest clang release already implements defer (under -fdefer-ts), i did implement defer for gcc, though my patches are still only floating in the mailing list

a few up-and-coming features past defer, there’s papers on an _Optional qualifier that marks pointers as nullable or not

things like if-declarations (if (int err = some_func()) { return err; }), named loops, and switch ranges, were already accepted, iirc

1: https://www.manning.com/books/modern-c-third-edition (you can read it for free on the bottom of the page)

#endif

navi @[email protected] · 2026-03-15 · 19:13 UTC

@kopper