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There's a good chance that if you were to rewrite some of today's existing stack in new languages you'd end up with more bugs, not fewer. C may be awful in som

There's a good chance that if you were to rewrite some of today's existing stack in new languages you'd end up with more bugs, not fewer. C may be awful in some respects but for quality it's going to be hard to beat 15 years of peer review with any new languages cool features.

StavrosK 9y ago
That makes no sense. There has been a ton of research. C, needing to be backwards-compatible, can only implement a subset of that research. More modern languages, not having this burden, are free to implement the entirety of this research. Therefore, C can only be at most equal to new languages, and overwhelmingly likely worse.
- jsymolon 9y ago
  Makes a lot of sense. You have 2 scenarios; 1) old code base in C, rewrite in language du jour. 2) new functionality in either C or spiffy lang 2.0 (SPIFFY). For scenario 1, all that functionality has to be duplicated, including "defects". Are you sure that the functionality is 100% there or did you miss any use cases? Decision for leaving it. Scenario 2, new widget. Most likely, coding in SPIFFY will be a better choice.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Run old anomalous traffic on old codebase that can handle the corner cases. Run the new traffic over the safe code that covers 80% of the use cases. Slowly expand the percentage of traffic coverable by the new safe code. The 80 percent case can be written and coded in a small amount of time. In curls example, it is fetching a file over http 1.1 using an encoding, possibly following some redirects. Then post and put requests, then chunked uploads, downloads, then? Need gopher and ftp? Run the old codepath.
    - mediocrejoker 9y ago
      If you had a list of all the corner cases from the start, wouldn't it be easy to just cover them in the new code? I thought the point of corner cases was that they introduce bugs because we don't think of them when we design the system.
      - sitkack 9y ago
        If you could infer a spec from the existing code, you have at least a 100M product on your hands.
        SCHiM 9y ago
        And probably solved the halting problem too ;)
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Is that because C is a "good language", or just because rewrites are error prone?
pdimitar 9y ago
You are conflating "new and cool language" with a "language that eliminates ton of possible bugs from the get go". These two terms are far from identical. You might be masquerading your conservative approach to new languages by hiding behind "C is mature". No it's not. Right now somebody on the planet is introducing a buffer overflow without knowing it, while coding in the "mature C". Get real already, please. It's high time. Random example: I dislike Go's error handling but the explicit nature of it has saved me from working half-asleep 50+ times already. Another one: one meager if/else in a supervised Elixir worker saved a server from infinite repeating of a bugged task that would otherwise keep crashing forever. There are others, lots of them. I am sure people can give plenty of examples for Rust as well.
- notacoward 9y ago
  I think you're overreacting. The GP wasn't being conservative about new languages for new projects. S/he was merely warning that rewrites carry their own risks, which might outweigh the benefits of better languages (or for that matter other infrastructure). If you avoid 100 bugs in the new version but add 101 because you didn't completely understand the old code and the environment it runs in, you haven't come out ahead. This phenomenon has been too well known for too long to be blithely ignored.
  - pdimitar 9y ago
    Me over-reacting is most likely true. Been dealing with people dismissing unquestionably life-improving tech for far too long lately. Sorry. I do believe most of Linux userland has to be rewritten though. Be it Go, Rust, Nim, D, doesn't matter much as long as it's a memory-safe language.
    - moxious 9y ago
      > I do believe most of Linux userland has to be rewritten though Why? I'm sympathetic to the argument that 2017 computing shouldn't be on the basis of 1970s UNIX limitations and mindset, but changing that would require a lot more than just rewriting the user land applications, and would require a bigger re-think. But assuming that the shell's functionality is OK as it is, what's to be gained in a re-write?

StavrosK 9y ago

That makes no sense. There has been a ton of research. C, needing to be backwards-compatible, can only implement a subset of that research. More modern languages, not having this burden, are free to implement the entirety of this research. Therefore, C can only be at most equal to new languages, and overwhelmingly likely worse.

jsymolon 9y ago
Makes a lot of sense. You have 2 scenarios; 1) old code base in C, rewrite in language du jour. 2) new functionality in either C or spiffy lang 2.0 (SPIFFY). For scenario 1, all that functionality has to be duplicated, including "defects". Are you sure that the functionality is 100% there or did you miss any use cases? Decision for leaving it. Scenario 2, new widget. Most likely, coding in SPIFFY will be a better choice.
- sitkack 9y ago
  Run old anomalous traffic on old codebase that can handle the corner cases. Run the new traffic over the safe code that covers 80% of the use cases. Slowly expand the percentage of traffic coverable by the new safe code. The 80 percent case can be written and coded in a small amount of time. In curls example, it is fetching a file over http 1.1 using an encoding, possibly following some redirects. Then post and put requests, then chunked uploads, downloads, then? Need gopher and ftp? Run the old codepath.
  - mediocrejoker 9y ago
    If you had a list of all the corner cases from the start, wouldn't it be easy to just cover them in the new code? I thought the point of corner cases was that they introduce bugs because we don't think of them when we design the system.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      If you could infer a spec from the existing code, you have at least a 100M product on your hands.
      - SCHiM 9y ago
        And probably solved the halting problem too ;)
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Is that because C is a "good language", or just because rewrites are error prone?

pdimitar 9y ago

You are conflating "new and cool language" with a "language that eliminates ton of possible bugs from the get go". These two terms are far from identical. You might be masquerading your conservative approach to new languages by hiding behind "C is mature". No it's not. Right now somebody on the planet is introducing a buffer overflow without knowing it, while coding in the "mature C". Get real already, please. It's high time. Random example: I dislike Go's error handling but the explicit nature of it has saved me from working half-asleep 50+ times already. Another one: one meager if/else in a supervised Elixir worker saved a server from infinite repeating of a bugged task that would otherwise keep crashing forever. There are others, lots of them. I am sure people can give plenty of examples for Rust as well.

notacoward 9y ago
I think you're overreacting. The GP wasn't being conservative about new languages for new projects. S/he was merely warning that rewrites carry their own risks, which might outweigh the benefits of better languages (or for that matter other infrastructure). If you avoid 100 bugs in the new version but add 101 because you didn't completely understand the old code and the environment it runs in, you haven't come out ahead. This phenomenon has been too well known for too long to be blithely ignored.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  Me over-reacting is most likely true. Been dealing with people dismissing unquestionably life-improving tech for far too long lately. Sorry. I do believe most of Linux userland has to be rewritten though. Be it Go, Rust, Nim, D, doesn't matter much as long as it's a memory-safe language.
  - moxious 9y ago
    > I do believe most of Linux userland has to be rewritten though Why? I'm sympathetic to the argument that 2017 computing shouldn't be on the basis of 1970s UNIX limitations and mindset, but changing that would require a lot more than just rewriting the user land applications, and would require a bigger re-think. But assuming that the shell's functionality is OK as it is, what's to be gained in a re-write?