Solod: Go can be a better C

7 comments

• aarvin_roshin 5 minutes ago

  The author's original blog post, which goes into some more detail: https://antonz.org/solod

• bb88 an hour ago

  How does it deal with pointers if everything is stack based? You can't really return a pointer to something on the stack because it could get overwritten between when you return it and when you access it.

  [-]

  • wrs 3 minutes ago

    Exactly as well as C does, it seems.

        func newPerson() *Person {
            p := Person{Name: "Alice", Age: 30}
            return &p
        }
    

    becomes

        static main_Person* newPerson(void) {
            main_Person p = (main_Person){.Name = so_str("Alice"), .Age = 30};
            return &p;
        }
    

    Quoting the FAQ: "So itself has few safeguards other than the default Go type checking. It will panic on out-of-bounds array access, but it won't stop you from returning a dangling pointer or forgetting to free allocated memory. Most memory-related problems can be caught with AddressSanitizer in modern compilers, so I recommend enabling it during development by adding -fsanitize=address to your CFLAGS."
  • zabzonk 37 minutes ago

    Well, it does say:

    "Everything is stack-allocated by default; heap is opt-in through the standard library."

    So it supports both stack and heap, and I guess static allocation too.

• jay_kyburz 3 minutes ago

  I've been using Go and Raylib to make a game lately and I really don't have a problem with garbage collection. It's so fast that it's not having an impact on my frame rate.

  I was a little worried at the start because nobody would normally consider Go for games, but I did a bunch of tests and found it's just no big deal.

  (I'm focused on game play and not interested in pushing hardware to its limits.)

• leecommamichael 2 hours ago

  I really like this idea. I was reading a post earlier about how Go generics are implemented, and how they're sort of leveraging root GC-types in the "runtime" to avoid the same bloat as monomorphization causes in, say, C++. I wonder how Solod will do that? I guess plain monomorphization? I guess that's fine since C compilers are so speedy.

• heyitsdaad 20 minutes ago

  Insert Look What They Need To Mimic A Fraction Of Our Power meme here.