The term “modern C” in the context of Ribbon’s design does not refer to recent C language standards (like C11 or C23), but to a specific philosophy and set of programming methodologies that have gained prominence in performance-critical fields like game development and systems tooling. It is a subculture of C/C++ programming that favors simplicity, explicitness, and a deep understanding of the underlying hardware.

This approach stands in contrast to the more traditional C++ style, which often emphasizes heavy abstraction, object-oriented hierarchies, and hidden control flow (e.g., complex constructors/destructors, exceptions). The “modern C” philosophy is a direct ancestor of the principles found in languages like Zig and was championed by figures like Ryan Fleury and the team behind the Our Machinery engine.

The core tenets of this philosophy are:

Data-Oriented Design (DOD)

Instead of organizing code around objects and their behaviors (Object-Oriented Programming), DOD organizes code around the data itself and how it is laid out in memory. The primary goal is to work with the hardware, not against it. This means arranging data to be friendly to the CPU cache, which is crucial for high performance.

• Key Idea: Structures are just plain old data (PODs). Code is organized into functions that transform batches of this data, often processing contiguous arrays of structures to maximize cache hits.

• Impact: This leads to simpler, more predictable, and often dramatically faster code than a heavily object-oriented equivalent where data is scattered across memory. Ribbon’s lightweight, composable component design is a direct application of this principle.

Explicit, Structured Memory Management

This is perhaps the most defining characteristic of the methodology. It’s a rejection of the ubiquitous malloc/free pattern for every small allocation. Individual, un-scoped allocations are seen as a source of performance loss (due to overhead and locking), memory fragmentation, and complex bugs (like use-after-free).

The solution is to manage memory in large, contiguous blocks with clear ownership and lifetimes.

Arena (or Region) Allocation: The most common pattern is the arena allocator (also called a region or bump allocator).

• How it works: You allocate a single, large block of memory from the operating system at the start of a process or frame.

• Allocating: To allocate memory from the arena, you simply “bump” a pointer forward by the requested size. This is incredibly fast: often just a single instruction.

• Deallocating: You don’t free individual objects. Instead, you deallocate the entire arena at once by resetting the bump pointer to the beginning.

This model is perfect for data that shares a common lifetime, such as all the assets loaded for a single game level, all the data for a single frame of computation, or all the nodes in a compiler’s Abstract Syntax Tree.

Composable Allocators: A key insight, heavily popularized by Zig, is that functions should not be hard-coded to use a single global allocator (malloc). Instead, they should accept an Allocator interface as a parameter. This makes code more modular, testable, and flexible. The caller can decide whether a function’s memory should come from the global heap, a temporary frame arena, or a fixed-size buffer on the stack.

Minimal Runtime and Hidden Complexity

This philosophy advocates for keeping things simple and transparent.

• No Hidden Code: Avoid language features that hide expensive operations or control flow. This means being wary of complex constructors that might allocate memory or heavy RAII patterns that can make the lifetime of resources difficult to track.

• Minimal Dependencies: The final executable should be lean, with a minimal, optional runtime. You only pay for what you explicitly use.

• Simple Tooling: The build process should be straightforward and fast.

Relevance to Ribbon

Ribbon is deeply inspired by this entire philosophy. We aim to take these powerful C methodologies, which often rely on programmer discipline; and elevate them into first-class, safer language constructs.

• Structured Allocation as a Language Feature: Ribbon’s type system, which tracks the allocator that owns a piece of memory, is a formalization of the composable allocator pattern. It makes an implicit C convention an explicit, statically-checked guarantee.

• Performance: The “near-metal speed” of Ribbon’s host-side API is a direct result of embracing these memory management strategies. Using arenas and simple data structures is the key to our minimal runtime and low memory footprint.

• Safety and Control: While the C approach provides raw power, it’s also prone to segfaults. Ribbon’s central design challenge was to keep this performance and control for host code while providing verifiable safety for guest code. Our type system, which understands memory regions and ownership, is the bridge that makes this possible.