Witek Bobrowski witekbobrowski

Here's a list of mildly interesting things about the C language that I learned mostly by consuming Clang's ASTs. Although surprises are getting sparser, I might continue to update this document over time.

There are many more mildly interesting features of C++, but the language is literally known for being weird, whereas C is usually considered smaller and simpler, so this is (almost) only about C.

1. Combined type and variable/field declaration, inside a struct scope [https://godbolt.org/g/Rh94Go]

struct foo {
   struct bar {
 int x;

Async/Await for Swift

Proposal: SE-XXXX
Authors: Chris Lattner, Joe Groff

Introduction

Modern Cocoa development involves a lot of asynchronous programming using closures and completion handlers, but these APIs are hard to use. This gets particularly problematic when many asynchronous operations are used, error handling is required, or control flow between asynchronous calls gets complicated. This proposal describes a language extension to make this a lot more natural and less error prone.

This paper introduces a first class Coroutine model to Swift. Functions can opt into to being async, allowing the programmer to compose complex logic involving asynchronous operations, leaving the compiler in charge of producing the necessary closures and state machines to implement that logic.

	// Very slightly adapted from http://stackoverflow.com/a/30141700/106244
	// 99.99% Credit to Martin R!

	// Mapping from XML/HTML character entity reference to character
	// From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
	private let characterEntities : [String: Character] = [

	// XML predefined entities:
	""" : "\"",
	"&" : "&",