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There has been dozens of "safe" additions, variants and extensions to C along the years (from commercial companies, from individuals, from university labs, ...)

by wott 8y ago

There has been dozens of "safe" additions, variants and extensions to C along the years (from commercial companies, from individuals, from university labs, ...). Not one of them ever took off. This one did not either. We always just say "hmmm... right... this one may look a bit better than the previous one (or doesn't)" and we never bother to use them. After 20 years like this, we can conclude that we like C as it is and are not interested in extra layers.

stefano 8y ago
> After 20 years like this, we can conclude that we like C as it is and are not interested in extra layers. This says a lot about how little the industry cares about software quality. You'd think a bunch of people who make a living out of automating tasks would happily use tools that automate the checking of an importnt source of bugs. Instead, many prefer to use tools that look simpler on the surface and then end up manually testing for the same kind of bugs over and over. So you have people writing in dynamically typed languages who rely on (manually written!) unit tests to check that their program is not mixing up types, and others using unsafe languages and then relying on tests to catch memory access violations. Inevitably, tests never catch all issues and you end up with type errors and segfaults in production.
- vmchale 8y ago
  > This says a lot about how little the industry cares about software quality. You'd think a bunch of people who make a living out of automating tasks would happily use tools that automate the checking of an importnt source of bugs. Instead, many prefer to use tools that look simpler on the surface and then end up manually testing for the same kind of bugs over and over. So you have people writing in dynamically typed languages who rely on (manually written!) unit tests to check that their program is not mixing up types, and others using unsafe languages and then relying on tests to catch memory access violations. In the case of a "safer C" I suspect it's largely because it never materialized. C still has its deficiencies relative to Rust, but Rust is the first viable competitor.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Sure it did, all major systems languages outside UNIX universe were safer than C. But the OSes they were tied to were killed by UNIX's adoption, just like the browser has helped JavaScript to take over areas of other languages.
zzzcpan 8y ago
For starters people have to realize that safe C is not a research problem. It's an engineering problem of compilers, package management and C software. And all it takes to take off is some engineering work. However funding that work is a big problem, since it mostly benefits others.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  You missed the most important one, people. Mentalities are very hard to change and we all know that only lousy programmers make errors in C.

by wott 8y ago

stefano 8y ago

> After 20 years like this, we can conclude that we like C as it is and are not interested in extra layers. This says a lot about how little the industry cares about software quality. You'd think a bunch of people who make a living out of automating tasks would happily use tools that automate the checking of an importnt source of bugs. Instead, many prefer to use tools that look simpler on the surface and then end up manually testing for the same kind of bugs over and over. So you have people writing in dynamically typed languages who rely on (manually written!) unit tests to check that their program is not mixing up types, and others using unsafe languages and then relying on tests to catch memory access violations. Inevitably, tests never catch all issues and you end up with type errors and segfaults in production.

vmchale 8y ago
> This says a lot about how little the industry cares about software quality. You'd think a bunch of people who make a living out of automating tasks would happily use tools that automate the checking of an importnt source of bugs. Instead, many prefer to use tools that look simpler on the surface and then end up manually testing for the same kind of bugs over and over. So you have people writing in dynamically typed languages who rely on (manually written!) unit tests to check that their program is not mixing up types, and others using unsafe languages and then relying on tests to catch memory access violations. In the case of a "safer C" I suspect it's largely because it never materialized. C still has its deficiencies relative to Rust, but Rust is the first viable competitor.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Sure it did, all major systems languages outside UNIX universe were safer than C. But the OSes they were tied to were killed by UNIX's adoption, just like the browser has helped JavaScript to take over areas of other languages.

zzzcpan 8y ago

For starters people have to realize that safe C is not a research problem. It's an engineering problem of compilers, package management and C software. And all it takes to take off is some engineering work. However funding that work is a big problem, since it mostly benefits others.

pjmlp 8y ago
You missed the most important one, people. Mentalities are very hard to change and we all know that only lousy programmers make errors in C.