The main problem I have with C is there isn't STL and Boost. Templates and generic programming are pretty darn useful. That said, I write a lot of C-like code in C+ + . (How does one escape two + in a row in Hubski markup?)
I'm guessing backslashes? Test: \\ Edit: Nope...
Not a great solution though, maybe mk can help us out? I guess the only way is by making the whole line verbatim? ++
I think, more generally, C makes a poor research language. But then, now that I've been bitten by the Python bug, it's hard to imagine how painful it must've been to write discrete event simulations in Cplusplus.
The longest emerge I've had on Gentoo, besides possibly the hundred-or-so dependencies of X, was actually pypy. I have Boost installed, but I can't honestly remember emerging it, which is to say, it had to have been painless.
quite frankly xorg was painless to install, however i keep it as lean as possible, Ill get back to you on this. Haven't compiled pypy but the longest i've gotten is firefox which i gave up on because after a couple of hours it maxed out the swap! should've paid attention to the notice of "you cant compile on anything with less than 1gb ram"