It's 2006. I'm working with threads in C and it's awful

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@kirtai @khleedril @eniko Supposedly Rust has fancy compiler assistance on deadlocks & such.

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

"Oh well if you're writing C you should be running Linu-"

I am not going to switch operating systems just to make it 5% less miserable to work with threads in C!!!

[gabrielesvelto@mas.to]

@eniko IIUC you can declare a C-compiler C11 compatible but not have support for the concurrency API, in which case the compiler defines __STDC_NO_THREADS__ and you can't include threads.h

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@gabrielesvelto that sounds like threads in C alright

[kirtai@tech.lgbt]

@gabrielesvelto @eniko
Why am I totally unsurprised.
Appalled yes, but unsurprised.

[srazkvt@tech.lgbt]

@eniko i have an easier time working with multiprocess than multithreading. that should tell you everything

[clarfonthey@toot.cat]

@eniko also switching to linux isn't going to make compiling for windows any less miserable

threads.h will still be broken

[ryan@m29.us]

@eniko Huh, TIL C99 has been superseded!

(My familiarity with C is just enough to be able to write patches for established software, but I can't write it from scratch.)

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@clarfonthey and if you're making a single header library it still has to compile on msvc

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@ryan that's cause nobody feels ready to use anything past C99 yet... for many reasons

[alrecenk@peoplemaking.games]

@eniko I don't know about the compile errors, but I recently learned about conditional variables in C++, which have made my muli-threading life much easier, just being able to wait for a condition before continuing. I also really like recursive_ mutex, lets you lock multiple times on one thread so locking functions can call other locking functions without worrying about a thread deadlocking itself.

[superfunc@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko this sounds like msvc, its such a pain haha

llvm on windows has gotten a lot better over the past few years, but that may not be an option for your circumstance

[maia@mastodon.art]

@eniko It’s optional and many don’t implement it

[pixx@merveilles.town]

@eniko

> no functional standard

Yeaaaaah

libthread is great but then i venture out into the real world and it's gone :(

[disorderlyf@todon.eu]

@eniko tbf working with C in 2026 sounds awful even on Linux. The only real benefit seems to be setup is less of a headache in general for working with any language on Linux

I say this as someone who primarily does shit in C in 2026

[brett_e_carlock@mastodon.online]

@superblox
@eniko
Half shitpost/half earnestpost:
But what about in Zig?

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@khleedril @eniko "now you have two problems" 🤣

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@eniko how's Clang in Windows these days? MSVC is notoriously bad (and obsolete) C-wise