Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves

ddboon 3 days ago 42 commentsRead Article on spader.zone

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Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

zzo38computer•about 1 hour ago

I agree with most of the criticisms they make.

I agree that pointer and length is better than null-terminated strings (although it is difficult in C, and as they mention you will have to use a macro (or some additional functions) to work this in C).

Making the C standard library directly against syscalls is also a good idea, although in some cases you might have an implementation that needs to not do this for some reason, generally it is better for the standard library directly against syscalls.

FILE object is sometimes useful especially if you have functions such as fopencookie and open_memstream; but it might be useful (although probably not with C) to be able to optimize parts of a program that only use a single implementation of the FILE interface (or a subset of its functions, e.g. that does not use seeking).

alfiedotwtf•38 minutes ago

Making every C call a system call is not a good idea at all - think about malloc() etc - the OS shouldn’t care about individual allocations and only worry about providing brk() etc. otherwise, performance will die if you’re doing a thousand system calls per second!

fithisux•about 1 hour ago

Null terminated strings have some merits but they should be a completely different data type like in Freebasic.

Sankozi•about 1 hour ago

Are there other merits than availability of literals in C?

It seems like one of the worst data structures ever - lookup complexity of a linked list with a expansion complexity of an array list with security problems added as a bonus.

boricj•23 minutes ago

It's fine as a serialization/deserialization primitive for on-disk files, as long as the NULL character is invalid.

String tables in most object file formats work like that, a concatenated series of ASCIIZ strings. One byte of overhead (NUL), requires only an offset into one to address a string and you can share strings with common suffixes. It's a very compact layout.

nextaccountic•about 2 hours ago

> Principles

> Be extremely portable

> sp.h is written in C99, and it compiles against any compiler and libc imaginable. It works on Linux, on Windows, on macOS. It works under a WASM host. It works in the browser. It works with MSVC, and MinGW, it works with or without libc, or with weird ones like Cosmopolitan. It works with the big compilers and it works with TCC.

> And, best of all, it does all all of that because it’s small, not because it’s big.

> Non-goals

> Obscure architectures and OSes

> I write code for x86_64 and aarch64. WASM is becoming more important, but is still secondary to native targets. I don’t care to bloat the library to support a tiny fraction of use cases.

> That being said, if you’re interested in using the library on an unsupported platform, I’m more than happy to help, and if we can make the patch reasonable, to merge it.

Those are contradictory. Either the code is extremely portable, or it can't support "obscure" platforms, but not both.

dboon•2 minutes ago

There are very few C libraries which compile, stock, against the matrix of toolchains, ABIs, and operating systems that this library does. For the subset of machines which run, I don't know, 99.9% of all instructions (i.e. x86_64 + aarch64, Linux + Darwin + Windows), the library just works. This is a definition of portability. Why would portability be a binary of supporting every possible system or being hard tied to a single one?

kazinator•22 minutes ago

You can be portable, without supporting obscure platforms.

Supporting obscure platforms is what makes portability "extreme", though.

ktpsns•about 2 hours ago

Exactly. This shows that "extremely portable" is actually marketing for "It supports a number of platforms. In my opinion, this number is big".

noosphr•about 1 hour ago

We support extreme portability for sufficiently large values of two.

riedel•44 minutes ago

I could not even find a mention what platform it supports. There is a Linux example on the bottom. Have never seem a libc implementation that does not even mention for which platforms it is meant.

forrestthewoods•19 minutes ago

bsder•17 minutes ago

You could, of course, spend 30 seconds look at the code on Github which you would have to do if you were interested in using it anyway?

  TRIPLES = \
    x86_64-linux-none x86_64-linux-gnu x86_64-linux-musl \
    aarch64-linux-none aarch64-linux-gnu aarch64-linux-musl \
    aarch64-macos \
    x86_64-windows-gnu \
    wasm32-freestanding wasm32-wasi

Or you could actually try the compliance suite on an architecture and report back to us if it works?

forrestthewoods•20 minutes ago

That’s a lot of text to say “well ackshually”.

Retr0id•about 3 hours ago

> Program directly against syscalls

Works nicely on Linux where the syscall interface is explicitly stable, but on many (most?) other platforms this is not the case.

> There Is No Heap

I don't understand what this means, when it's followed by the definition of a heap allocation interface. The paragraph after the code block conveys no useful information.

> Null-terminated strings are the devil’s work

Agreed! I also find the stance regarding perf optimization agreeable.

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

Looks like the default allocator uses mmap(2) for every single allocation, which is horribly inefficient - you map a whole PAGE_SIZE worth of memory for every tiny string. Aside from just wasting memory this will make the TLB very unhappy.

It looks like sp_log's string formatting is entirely unbuffered which results in lots of tiny write syscalls.

AlotOfReading•about 2 hours ago

That seems to be a pretty consistent quality level for the entire library. Look at the implementations in sp_math, yikes.

12_throw_away•about 1 hour ago

Oh man. Oof. I'm sure there must be some repository out there that has an AGENTS.md but isn't pure slopcode, but I haven't seen it yet. The number of people who can be trusted to vibe code "responsibly" is probably about the same as the number of people who can be trusted to write memory safe C.

locknitpicker•about 2 hours ago

> That seems to be a pretty consistent quality level for the entire library. Look at the implementations in sp_math, yikes.

That does spin the meaning of "Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves"

jcranmer•about 2 hours ago

"How bad can it be, I mean I know that numerics are not many people's strong suit, but..."

... ... ... oh wow, the math functions are really bad implementations. The range reduction on the sin/cos functions are yikes-level. Like the wrong input gives you an infinite loop level of yikes.

gabriela_c•16 minutes ago

Jesus! Claude could've told this guy all these things. People underestimate how much the average malloc implementation does and how many considerations it makes. Or how much IO sucks.

zamadatix•about 2 hours ago

> Works nicely on Linux where the syscall interface is explicitly stable, but on many (most?) other platforms this is not the case.

There is a footnote on this saying as much:

> 3. Where “syscall” means “the lowest level primitive available”. On Linux, it’s always actual syscalls. On Windows, that’s usually NT. On macOS, it’s usually the syscall-wrapper subset of libc because you’re forced to link libc and it’s not quite as open as Linux (although there is a rich “undocumented” set of APIs and syscalls that are very interesting).

DeathArrow•about 1 hour ago

What about BSDs?

whateverboat•about 1 hour ago

syscalls

quuxplusone•about 2 hours ago

The "definition of a heap allocation interface" indicates that there is no standard heap. Instead, there's a standard interface for the use to define their own heaps. Any standard library function that needs to allocate will take a sp_allocator_t parameter, and use that to allocate. As opposed to e.g. strdup, which hard-codes a call to malloc internally. Sp.h's strdup-alike would take an sp_allocator_t as input and call into that to get the memory it needs.

A C++ programmer might describe this as "PMR, but not default-constructible. And std::stable_sort takes a PMR allocator parameter. And PMR is the default, and there's no implementation of std::allocator (or new or delete)."

pjmlp•about 1 hour ago

We should have left C in the 90's already, but then FOSS happened,

"Using a language other than C is like using a non-standard feature: it will cause trouble for users. Even if GCC supports the other language, users may find it inconvenient to have to install the compiler for that other language in order to build your program. So please write in C."

The GNU Coding Standard in 1994, http://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/standards_7.html#SEC12

Panzerschrek•36 minutes ago

How does this library work in programs with parts still requiring libc?

How does it deal with code executing before main? Libc does a bunch of necessary stuff, like calling initializers for global variables.

Panzerschrek•43 minutes ago

It's a disadvantage, that it's header-only. It needs to include <windows.h> and a bunch of other stuff, which slow-downs compilation. Splitting it into a couple of files (a header and an implementation) would be much better.

Panzerschrek•39 minutes ago

This doesn't look good:

  c8 buf [SP_PATH_MAX] = sp_zero;
  sp_cstr_copy_to_n(path, len, buf, SP_PATH_MAX);

since

  #define SP_PATH_MAX 4096

There should be a fallback for very long paths.

skybrian•about 3 hours ago

My impression of the sample programs is that they're unreadably noisy, but maybe this would be a good compiler target if you're writing your own language?

JSR_FDED•about 2 hours ago

I love how hyper-opinionated this is.

smitty1e•about 1 hour ago

Family saying: "It ain't bragging if you can do it."

When one is competent to work at this level, strong opinions are in order.

Their correctness is something I cannot gage. I'm barely competent to follow the conversation.

rmunn•about 1 hour ago

Considering the first thing I saw in the thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48244891 where the values returned from sp's sine function was compared to the correct values, I'm going to take any such opinions with a few grains of salt. Because the correct sine for the number they tested (31337 radians) is 0.3772 (0.3771522646 according to my calculator), sp's implementation returned 0.4385. That's not even close to right.

KnuthIsGod•about 1 hour ago

"The library’s stance, to put it simply, that the juice ain’t worth the squeeze when it comes to low level, compute-bound performance.

Designing software and data structures for performance against unknown use cases on unknown hardware is extremely difficult and the resulting code is much more complicated. Even then, it’s often better to use code written against your actual use case and hardware when performance is that critical.

Things that are off the table might be:

SIMD A highly optimized hash table rewrite Figuring out where inlining or LIKELY causes the compiler to produce better code."

LOL...

Classic vibe coder.

504118318•40 minutes ago

Just taking a quick look at the atomics section:

First, (on unix) it's wrapping pthread mutex. That's part of libc! (Technically it might not be libc.so, but it's still the standard library.)

Also, none of the atomics talk about the memory model. You don't _have_ to use the C11 memory model (Linux, for example, doesn't). But if you're not using the C11 memory model and letting the compiler insert fences for you, you definitely need to have fence instructions, yourself.

While C11 atomics do rely on libgcc, so do the __sync* functions that this library uses (see https://godbolt.org/z/bW1f7xGas) for an example.

Oops... apparently this is vibecoded. Welp, I just wasted ten minutes of my life reviewing slop that I'm not going to get back.

nektro•about 2 hours ago

not one mention of Zig on the whole page?

dboon•9 minutes ago

I had half of a manifesto about how C programmers should be embarrassed on account of Zig but I ended up paring it down to be more focused on what the library is plainly.

Zig is obviously incredible and this library would not exist without it being the standard bearer for systems programming in many ways

Kab1r•about 3 hours ago

Best library name.

KnuthIsGod•about 1 hour ago

Wonderful !

Yet another slop coded library.

What could possibly go wrong...

TZubiri•about 3 hours ago

> Every language that depends on third party libraries, like js and python, is getting massively infected with supply chain worms

> Only couple of languages not affected are those that don't have a culture of downloading third party code, like C and C++

> Ex js and python developer publishes a 'library'

> Library is vibe coded

> Published on github amidst GitHub being hit by supply chain attacks, had their source code leaked.

The timing is terrible for starters, and I don't trust the vibe coded code at all. Imagine a pandemic and the cities are on fire, and you arrive to a rural town asking to kiss people.

redlewel•about 1 hour ago

Thanks for this comment, I was about to bookmark the repo for later you saved me the time.