3 ms·
To me, C is a tale of the perils of maintaining backwards compatibility: there are lots of parts of C, and particularly its standard library, that should never
by a-priori 7y ago
To me, C is a tale of the perils of maintaining backwards compatibility: there are lots of parts of C, and particularly its standard library, that should never be used because there's no way to do so safely, but can never be removed and so inevitably new code will continue to be written that uses them.
- jstimpfle 7y agoWhat is there? I'm thinking of gets() which was actually removed from the standard. Other functions, you can absolutely use them correctly, even if it's not a great idea. I don't think a large percentage of C bugs comes from the standard library. If you depend on some functions in the standard library, it's super-easy to replace them. They're leaf dependencies. Anyway, C has about the smallest standard library you can have. And if we're talking about it's benefits in terms of compatibility, we're probably talking about the fact that it doesn't introduce new syntax / language features each other week.