I'm a little surprised at the prevalence of char* or even char[] in any modern code. Since its basic

I'm a little surprised at the prevalence of char* or even char[] in any modern code. Since its basically just "a place in memory" it seems inherently unsafe

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:37 AM

welcome to C

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:37 AM

its the

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:37 AM

only

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:37 AM

option

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:37 AM

that is portable

Opcode_OP•5/23/22, 2:38 AM

must OpenXR be implemented in strictly C? Not C++?

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:38 AM

we cant bind to C++

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:38 AM

we can only bind to C

Opcode_OP•5/23/22, 2:38 AM

Oh?

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:38 AM

we cant call C++ functions from C#

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:39 AM

theres no standardized convention for doing so

LLyris the Kitori theres no standardized convention for doing so

Opcode_OP•5/23/22, 2:41 AM

Really? So a .dll written in C++ that you might want to somewhere outside of C++ is just a no-go? It becomes a C library?

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:41 AM

you have to bind to it from C, then bind to the C

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:42 AM

its how ImGui.NET works at all

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 2:42 AM

given ImGui is C++

Redhacker2•5/23/22, 3:47 AM

Yeah

Redhacker2•5/23/22, 3:47 AM

There is no standard C++ ABI, Each compiler does it differently

Redhacker2•5/23/22, 3:47 AM

C is much easier in that regard

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 3:48 AM

you can pretty much assume a standard ABI with C

Redhacker2•5/23/22, 3:48 AM

Silk.net 3.0 is poised to hopefully change this though

Redhacker2•5/23/22, 3:48 AM

With clangsharp being the basis of silktouch

Lyris the Kitori•5/23/22, 3:48 AM

im guessing we are going to precompile everything with a single compiler so we can be sure

Kai•5/23/22, 5:23 AM

yep, clang will handle all the things for us

Kai•5/23/22, 5:24 AM

also pointing out that the Vulkan / OpenXR and in general the khronos specs are all largely C oriented. They have C++ headers which might have better information in terms of "this should be a string" but the spec doesn't actually say that

OOpcode_I'm a little surprised at the prevalence of char* or even char[] in any modern c...

Eagle•5/23/22, 12:55 PM

If we're talking about C, it doesn't have anything else natively. To my knowledge, the only concept of immutability there is probably constants. The language was developed in the 70s and despite its abstractions from machine language, it's still relatively close to the low level concepts, even to the point where its strong typing nature can be ignored entirely.

The language also has such a long history in programming it can hardly change from what it is, or then you get a mess like C++.

C++ is also a reason C doesn't get much feature updates, I guess.
C is also still used for embedded applications on low-power devices (microcontrollers etc...). It's a neat small and robust language for small applications, and because of its past popularity, it's supported pretty much everywhere.
In C# though, I do agree that there should be no need for pointers in any program. References are their managed equivalent, and coming from a guy that's learned programming from the id Tech 3/Quake III Arena engine (using ANSI C and some x86 assembly), it's worked just fine for me so far. The only reason they are supported is probably interop, and they're technically even more limited than they are in C/C++, if I'm not mistaken. The only probable downside of not using pointers may be performance on immutable types (strings, delegates), since it requires reallocation and garbage collection, but the standard library (.NET) likely provides something to help with that. StringBuilderStringBuilder and the more recent Span<>Span<> are examples of that.

Kai•5/23/22, 12:58 PM

Yeah where zero cost abstractions (or very very close to zero cost, think span) are possible we want them for sure. For non-zero cost abstractions we're looking to find a good way to expose the native / zero cost + managed values in a way that is ergonomic but keeps the zero costness

Ҡєʀ๓aℓıѕ•5/23/22, 8:56 PM

Unrelated to silk but I posted in another discord and got no response:

am I stupid or is Half not working? I'm using Half.MinValue and it returns -65500 instead of -65504 like expected. I can't add 0.5 either to -65500. I know there's lower accuracy but I feel like the value doesn't move at all. Doing -65500 + 25 gives me -65470

Ҡєʀ๓aℓıѕ•5/23/22, 8:56 PM

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/169726586931773440/978399593408639046/unknown.png