4 ms·
This is an important point, and it's why the "C should die" crowd is hard to take seriously. They've even started labeling people who use C as somehow morally s
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
This is an important point, and it's why the "C should die" crowd is hard to take seriously. They've even started labeling people who use C as somehow morally suspect, as if we're bad people for choosing to use an unsafe language. We're knowingly putting people in danger! Right.
It's strange that the word "unsafe" has tainted people's thoughts so dramatically. Like calling torrenting music "piracy."
- pjmlp 9y agoIf one don't follow the High Integrety, CERT, MISRA standards, validated with tools like LDRA. Or at very minimumm compiling with warning enabled as errors, with a continuous build breaking on static analysers errors, then yes.
- pcwalton 9y agoI'm not endorsing C. Don't use C for anything you need to be secure.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI need Emacs to be secure. It's written in C. It interfaces with the internet. Ditto for Bitcoin. It's the basis of a new financial system. The core software is written in C++. Same for Linux. C. Prejudice generally isn't helpful, and it's a bit strange that you can recognize C's merits while also decrying it.
- pcwalton 9y agoI haven't been "recognizing C's merits" either. In fact, the real reason behind this problem is that C is not type safe, so optimizations (such as the one in this very article!) that are perfectly fine to do in type-safe languages are not possible to do in C without aggressively "exploiting" undefined behavior.