Toast to C

By Jason – October 13, 2011

At Cloudmetrx, we use a lot of C. So given the recent passing of UNIX legend Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C language, we think a toast to C is only fitting.

Our extensive reliance on C is especially unusual considering the other languages in our stack – Clojure, Node.js, and other hipster platforms. We aren't predisposed to using older, "venerated" technologies simply because they're older and venerated. But when it comes to high-performant computation, there's just nothing like C. Some will claim Java, but those people are incorrect. There's nothing like C.

In my opinion, the reason C has maintained its popularity for all these years is that it is relatively paradigm-free. Most languages, for better or worse, come equipped with some inherently recommended programming paradigm – object-oriented, functional, whatever. The realities of the hardware, then, are sculpted to best support that paradigm.

C, on the other hand, doesn't sculpt the hardware. It gives you raw access to the hardware. You do what you wish with the hardware. There is no inherent overhead due to your paradigm – you are expected to enforce whatever paradigm you please by yourself.

C is the Turing part of the Church-Turing Thesis. C basically gives you math plus a ticker tape you can write onto. All algorithms revolve around those two basic concepts: reading and writing to the tape, and doing small mathematical operations.

As it happens, the universal computing device referred to in the Thesis is implemented like Turing, but often used like Church. The lambda calculus revolves around meaningful and elegant representations of behavior, as it makes sense to humans; but the Turing Machine represents behavior as it makes sense for a machine based on transistors and electrons. It is the more natural of the two; and so C is a more natural way to harness the power of the actual hardware, at the expense of readability, and perhaps even elegance.

It is quite a feat to create a technology still being actively used decades after its inception and rise to popularity. I don't think the only reason is that it is (relatively speaking) paradigm-free. The syntax itself is also brilliant – as complex as the language is, and as complex as managing memory is, C makes it brilliantly clear what is going on. The C syntax has also influenced other languages – from PERL to Java to JavaScript – a testament to its clarity and usability.

And with all this power, C is still a joy to write in. There's something special to me about cracking a 5-hour energy and sitting down with vim to hack some C. It's like driving a manual car, and feeling the rush as you switch gears, going faster and faster. After a month of Python, C drives like a BMW with a rocket engine. The speed is facemelting; you run time and your jaw drops at the results – a millisecond! For that? Amazing.

But C isn't always pretty. C can be a naughty girl that seg faults, leaving you in despair, confused, forced to use gdb . But at the end of the day, you always come back to C – that seductress of speed. [Citation needed]

At Cloudmetrx, we use C for essentially all of our financial logic except bootstrapping . Without the ability to crank out a blindingly fast result in C, the Real-Time Cloudmetrx product would likely be impossible, since we wouldn't be able to use horizontal scale to handle the loads. And indeed, the speed difference between a derivative pricing model – many of which require Monte Carlo – written in C and a model written in Java is noticeable. Not huge, but noticeable; and likely too big to serve real-time financial analytics.

So here's to C, that naughty girl, that seductress of speed. Salud!

 

From: http://jasonvictordartmouth.posterous.com/a-toast-to-c