Criticism of the C programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:38, 12 March 2008

Revision as of 19:20, 12 March 2008

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There are dialects of C, such as [[Objective-C]] and [[Cyclone programming language|Cyclone]], that address some of these concerns.

Many compilers, notably [[Visual C++]] and [[Xcode]], deal withreduce the long compilation times inflictedcaused by very large [[header file]] inclusions by using ''[[precompiled header]]s'', a system where declarationsthe contents of a header are stored in an intermediateform format that is quickdesigned to parse.be Buildingmuch thequicker precompiledto headerprocess filesthan intext. theThe firsttime placeneeded isto expensive,build buta this is generally done only for systemprecompiled header files, whichis areirrelevant largerbecause andit moreonly numerousneeds thanto mostbe applicationdone headeronce, filesoutside andof alsothe changenormal much lesscompilation oftenprocess.

It should be recognized that these tools are not a [[Panacea_(disambiguation)|panacea]]. Because of C's flexibility, some types of errors involving misuse of variadic functions, out-of-bounds array indexing, and incorrect [[memory management]] cannot be detected on some architectures without incurring a significant performance penalty. However, some common cases can be recognized and accounted for.