A pragmatic C
An itch that needed a scratch: why Prism exists, and how small pragmatic changes make C safer without a rewrite.
Read the article →Prism Blog
Notes on C, compilers, and the work of making an existing codebase safer without rewriting it.
#Also on this site
Long-form posts land here. Two other kinds of writing live nearby and are usually what people are actually looking for.
C in practice collects short, tested write-ups on parts of the language that compile quietly and go wrong later: whether = {0} zeroes the padding between struct members, why a goto past an initializer draws no diagnostic under -Wall -Wextra, and how struct S and S end up naming unrelated types in one file. Each one states the behaviour, shows it measured against a real compiler, cites the standard, and gives a fix that needs no tooling.
The documentation covers Prism itself: defer, orelse, zero-initialization and the rest, plus the specification and the release history.
#Follow along
New posts appear in the Atom feed. Prism development happens in the open on GitHub, where the commit log is a reasonable proxy for what tends to get written about next: most of the C in practice entries started as a bug fix.