Hello, world.

This is CS50 on Twitch.

My name is Colton Ogden, and I'm joined, once again, by--

NICK WONG: Nick Wong, hello.

That is my name, actually.

Sorry.

I guess I should start with that.

Oh, well.

COLTON OGDEN: What are we talking about today?

NICK WONG: So today we're going to talk about C, not C++, not C#, not Python.

COLTON OGDEN: A lot of C languages out there.

NICK WONG: C, yeah.

COLTON OGDEN: But C is like the progenitor-- progenitor?

NICK WONG: Yeah.

Progenitor, I think it was.

COLTON OGDEN: Progenitor.

These are the old fashioned ones, very simple, very lightweight

programming language.

NICK WONG: Yes.

COLTON OGDEN: And today--

NICK WONG: Fast is how it works.

COLTON OGDEN: --we're not going to-- yeah, very fast.

We're not going to be talking necessarily about the stuff

that we cover in CS50, though, right?

We're going to be doing maybe more of a deep dive?

NICK WONG: Yeah.

So we will open up GDB, which is the debugger for CS--

sorry, for C. Yes, for all of CS.

COLTON OGDEN: For all of CS.

NICK WONG: A granddaddy debugger.

We're going to walk through a little bit more in depth than CS50 does.

Although CS50 does talk about things like Malok

and memory spaces and things like that.

But I will also kind of be a little bit clearer on stack versus heap allocation

and why one was important, why the other one is not--

sorry, why any one is important at any one time.

We'll talk a little bit about buffer overflows and things

like that, as well as how input-output standard I/O works,

because I think that's really cool.

COLTON OGDEN: Yeah, yeah.

No, except low level, to a lot of people that are maybe not

super familiar with CS50 might think that means very basic.

NICK WONG: Easy, simple.

No, no.

That is a great misconception, I think, where a lot of programmers will say,

low level, high level, and then people are like,

oh, I want to learn high-level stuff.

And generally, that actually seems to be kind of true in the modern day and age.

A lot of people do like to learn high-level things.

But that is not because it's harder or cooler or anything.

High may kind of refer to, if you imagine a computer system

as at the lowest level, you have hardware, and at the highest level

you might have a graphic interface, and everything in between

is kind of organized.

Then that's what people are talking about.

So in the lowest level you have this literal, electrons running around

in, like, a piece of metal.

If you wanted to kind of vastly oversimplify and humorously

oversimplify what's going on, we basically took a rock,

tricked it into thinking, and then electrocuted it.

And that's the computer, right?

That is a computer's lowest level.

And then right above that, you have this kind of--

and we'll skip a few levels, just for the sake of time and clarity.

But there's basically machine code, and we'll kind of approximate that

as assembly, which is basically--

I'll show a couple of examples of what that looks like.

But the instructions, they're roughly one-for-one instructions

that a processor will execute.

And I say roughly, because that's not entirely true,

but it's the right concept.

And then maybe one step up from that, we might

have something like C, which is then going to be compiled down

into machine code or assembly.

And then that will get interpreted in some way.

And then maybe above that you might have something

like Python, which actually ends up kind of running on C. I mean,

it depends on the runtime you pick.

But it could actually be run through C.

COLTON OGDEN: Use C to compile the program that

executes the Python scripts, basically.

NICK WONG: Right.

Exactly.

Cool.

Awesome.

COLTON OGDEN: I'm very excited to dig into this stuff, because I

know C is a very popular language, or has been historically,

for game development.

NICK WONG: Right.

COLTON OGDEN: Assembly before it, for the old--

to tie back into, like, our NES stream.

NES was really in 6502 assembly--

NICK WONG: Oh, that's brutal.

COLTON OGDEN: --a very common older microprocessor,

still in use for small devices, but not as much

as I think more RMCPs these days.

NICK WONG: Yeah.

COLTON OGDEN: We have a lot of people in the chat.

I just want to shout out everybody who's joined us here in advance.

So scrolling way up, we have a lot of chat here.

So [? TwitchHelloWorld-- ?] that's [? JacksJPGuys, ?] [? ISOTV-- ?] let me

just keep scrolling here. [? Brenda, ?] [? RealCuriousKiwi, ?] was in the chat.

I see [? NonBored. ?] Thank you for joining--

[? Asley, ?] [? Nowanda353, ?] as always.

[? John09JLardinois, ?] thank you very much for joining today.

[? VippleBHJ ?] and [? Bhavic Knight-- ?]

[? Bhavic Knight's ?] a long-time regular as well.

Let me just make sure I haven't missed anybody else.

I think we had [? LKit57 ?] joined us.

I don't recognize that name.

I might just have a terrible memory.

But I hope I don't have a terrible memory.

Thank you very much for joining if this is your first time.

If not, I apologize. [? OoeyZuck, ?] Thank you very much for joining.

[? GoldenKappaChick-- ?] I'm not entirely sure what that means.

But I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Oh, we've got a lot of Kappas.

Maybe that's what-- maybe they're trying to do a Kappa test.

NICK WONG: Yeah.

COLTON OGDEN: Test and see if Kappas are working.

OK, [? JLardinois ?] was talking about [? AnnFogleman, ?] craft projects,

this is like the Minecraft C port, which sort of ties--

NICK WONG: I see, yeah.

COLTON OGDEN: --into this conversation.

He's saying he found a really good use for--

it looks like switch-case.

NICK WONG: Switch-case and break.

Nice.

COLTON OGDEN: Switch-case is a very, very common puzzle piece to use in C.

Everybody's hyped--

phones less delayed than PCs.

That's interesting-- higher the level, more abstractions.

NICK WONG: Right.

That is a great way of putting it, actually.

COLTON OGDEN: Yeah-- obviously trying to manipulate the Silicon directly with--

it's just you're going to be less productive than being able to write

a Python script, for example.

NICK WONG: Right.

Exactly.

COLTON OGDEN: So different layers of abstraction

allow you to do different things more or less easily.

MoHelat says, what can we do with the C language?

NICK WONG: So that's actually a really interesting question.

In talking about any--

they're called Turing-complete languages-- so basically,

any programming language you can think of--

you can do anything.

Anything that you can imagine being done with any language

can be done by any of the other ones.

So if I can do it in Python, I could also do it in C.

I could also do it using only NAND commands.

Technically, there is that possibility.

So generally, what ends up happening is, when people say what can we

do with language, or what do programmers do in a language,

they generally mean a little bit more like, what's convenient?

So what things have been written to be really, really good in that language?

What things have a bunch of APIs or libraries?

I guess, what has the language been really specialized for?

So when someone says that like R, for example, is built for biostatistics,

they mean, really, that there are a lot of developers who are in bio

and do a bunch of biostats who develop for R.

And those people are going to be a great community for that.

They have a bunch of resources.

They'll answer all your questions on it--

all sorts of things.

But that is not necessarily going to mean that you couldn't, in R,

build Minecraft, for example.

In concept, you could.

But whether or not you'd want to is--

I mean, I would argue you probably don't want to.

[LAUGHTER]

COLTON OGDEN: That'd be interesting to see.

NICK WONG: Right.

COLTON OGDEN: I'd be curious to see how somebody does that.

NICK WONG: --or like, a neural network in OCaml.

You can do it.

It would not necessarily be super fun.

Whereas in Python, It's pretty convenient.

And so these kind of choices-- they're based on convenience and comfort.

COLTON OGDEN: People have done a lot of hard work

making libraries and stuff like that, too.

NICK WONG: Right.

Exactly.

COLTON OGDEN: --people that have had an interest in solving these problems--

NICK WONG: Yes.

COLTON OGDEN: --put that hard work in in advance

to make it easy for everybody else.

NICK WONG: Exactly.

COLTON OGDEN: [? GravyWave123 ?] says buffer overflow.

NICK WONG: Yes.

We will talk about that, actually.

COLTON OGDEN: Why is C considered so fast once it is compiled?

Wouldn't any compiled language already be

compiled into binary, so therefore run with the same speed?

NICK WONG: Sure.

COLTON OGDEN: So that;s [? TwitchHelloWorld? ?]

NICK WONG: That is a great question.

So one of the things is that the developers of the C compiler--

if we're talking about CC or Clang, then that

has been just so thoroughly developed.

It's a brilliant compiler.

And we'll talk about compiler flags a little bit today.

And I think that--

there's a funny story dealing with compiler flags and the speller piece

in CS50.

But basically, the builders of that compiler-- the architects--

designed so many, just, brilliant techniques

for compiling from the C abstract machine down into assembly

that that ends up abstracting out-- or I guess not abstracting out,

but cleaning up a lot of your C code once you've

written it, to make it faster.

And one of the other problems that's faced by--

maybe you built another compiler and it's just as smart

as theirs, except maybe your code is like Python, where it's interpreted.

So every time I run it, it actually has to interpret the code that is being run

and then compile it as it goes.

So then that interpretation step actually

ends up taking up a bunch of time, as well.

And there's a couple other reasons that deal a little bit more with how C

integrates-- or C, C++, C#--

all integrate with--

I guess integrate's the wrong word.

It's not exactly what I'm looking for--

don't have as much overhead in what they do.

So for example, Java requires the entire JVM in order to run.

And that's a lot more overhead than C, which is literally just executing

instructions.

So there's all sorts of interesting things there.

There's a lot more complexity to that than I will be able to answer--

and probably--

guaranteedly more than I know.

[LAUGHS] But those are some reasons that come up to the top of my head.

COLTON OGDEN: Yeah.

So abstraction, in a lot of ways, you're paying for performance.

NICK WONG: Right.

COLTON OGDEN: Obviously electricity flowing through a rock--

NICK WONG: [LAUGHS]

More performance.

NICK WONG: Very fast.

You might not understand it, but it's very fast.

COLTON OGDEN: And to your point about NAND gates--

I think it was watching a video recently on Computerphile or something,

where they were talking about how transistors are purely built off