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The wonderful thing about C is that bad coding can't hide. The programs blow up early and loudly. In safer languages, the memory bombs go away through garbage
by jstewartmobile 8y ago
The wonderful thing about C is that bad coding can't hide. The programs blow up early and loudly. In safer languages, the memory bombs go away through garbage collection / safe pointers / borrow checking / etc, but all of the uglier and quieter mistakes are still very much there.
Knuth and von Neumann took the same approach to PRNGs back in the early days...
- kqr 8y ago> The programs blow up early and loudly. Loudly, sure. Early? I wish that was the case. Heartbleed and other high-profile exploits rely on this sort of thing being able to pass unnoticed.
- jstewartmobile 8y agoYou got me, fair-and-square! Speaking holistically though, most of the programs I enjoy using on a daily basis were written in either C or C++. Safer languages should have a tremendous edge here, but the proof has not made its way into the pudding. Just think C works as a kind of "high-pass" filter for programmers--and is net positive to overall software quality. Memory issues? YMMV
- yitchelle 8y agoWell, the ones that blow up quietly are the ones that you must be really careful about. Imagine a slow memory leak that would only crash the system after a few months on continuous usage, I could throw up just thinking about it :-)