One of the things I’ve noticed moving from C (and Objective-C) to languages like C++ and Rust, with richer static type systems is that it changes what most of the code is for.
When I write C code, ...
@nprofile1q... it is also interesting to look at how it changes when you go back from a higher level language to writing C (e.g. some glue code between the high-level language and the system).
In my case (where I write OCaml day-to-day), going back to C makes me realize just how much code is *not for the thing*: there is a lot of code to handle allocation, and manual error handling.
You need much less manual error handling when you have exceptions, or result types in your language (where the compiler tells you if you forgot to handle an error).
And having a GC means you write less code that deals with memory management (not 0, because you still need to think about limiting memory usage).
In my case (where I write OCaml day-to-day), going back to C makes me realize just how much code is *not for the thing*: there is a lot of code to handle allocation, and manual error handling.
You need much less manual error handling when you have exceptions, or result types in your language (where the compiler tells you if you forgot to handle an error).
And having a GC means you write less code that deals with memory management (not 0, because you still need to think about limiting memory usage).