Criticism of the C programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:40, 30 August 2006

Revision as of 23:02, 30 August 2006

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Many compilers, most notably Visual C++, deal with the long compilation times inflicted by header file inclusion using ''precompiled headers'', a system where declarations are stored in an intermediate format that is quick to parse. Building the precompiled header files in the first place is expensive, but this is generally done only for system header files, which are larger and more numerous than most application header files and also change much less often.

[[Cproto]] is a program that will read a C source file and output prototypes of all the functions within the source file. This program can be used in conjunction with the "make" command to create new files containing prototypes each time the source file has been changed. These prototype files can be included by the original source file (e.g., as "filename.p"), which reduces the problems of keeping function definitions and source files in agreement.

It should be recognized that these tools are not a 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.