Jun 23, 2017

Portable C in Japanese

I recently have taken an interest in writing portable code. In part because of my involvement in the Orx Project, and in part because my job requires me to write code that can cross compile and run on multiple embedded platforms.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I was on the hunt for good programming blogs in Japanese. Since I’m teaching myself the language to ostensibly do the things I do daily in said language, I decided to take a crack at search-engine-fu in Japanese.

I seached something along the lines of “C言語 プログラミング portable”. After a bit of surfing, I came across 移植性のあるCプログラミング, which more-or-less translates to “Programming Portable C”. It’s exactly what you’d expect it to be. A bunch of bite-sized posts that focus on a specific aspect of writing portable code. The author hasn’t updated the blog in quite some time. Thankfully writing portable code is vaguely synonymous with using old standards of the language to minimize compiler incompatibility, so it’s not like it needs to be updated to remain relevant.

So can I read it? Well… sorta. I can read the code, which gives me a great deal of context. I can Kanji-pick too, so I can at least get the gist of what I’m looking at. Then it’s relatively trivial to translate the rest with the help of various websites.

I’ve used a bit of the blog for sentence mining, and I’ve learned a few useful coding tidbits from it as well. A lot of it is pretty obvious stuff, but it’s still a nice reference. Who knows? Maybe you could learn a thing or two from some Japanese guy who just wants to write some portable C code. :)