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As a Gentoo user and an enthusiastic non-x86 user, when I was just reading the opening, I expected to hear an argument about the necessity of supporting uncommo

As a Gentoo user and an enthusiastic non-x86 user, when I was just reading the opening, I expected to hear an argument about the necessity of supporting uncommon architectures as a standard library. Gentoo supports a broad range of systems, every time an underlying library switches to a less supported environment creates a headache for Gentoo developers and users, "vintage architecture needs some love" would be an interesting article (not saying it's practical, but interesting). Unfortunately, the author's main argument is a denial of C's memory safety problems. I was disappointed.

ghoward 6y ago
Author here. If you read deeper into the post, I do, in fact, talk about how supporting those less well-known architectures is important. Edit: Also, those arguments were made plenty by others, so I didn't feel a need to rehash them much.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  (note: the original comment has been rewritten) > If you read deeper into the post I did skim the entire post, but the discussion on supporting alternative computer architectures was significantly shorter than the issue of memory safety, or Rust or Zig as languages. > Also, those arguments were made plenty by others, so I didn't feel a need to rehash them much. Fair enough. BTW, I agree with you that generating portable C is actually an interesting solution. Recently, there are a few successful projects like HACL* (Microsoft) [0], Fiat-Crypto (MIT CSAIL) [1] that are based on this idea - they use a high-level framework to synthesize human-unreadable but formally verified C code, effectively using C as a form of portable assembly. Both have been deployed in real-world systems like OpenSSH, Chromium and the Linux kernel with great success. [0] https://github.com/project-everest/hacl-star https://github.com/project-everest/hacl-star [1] https://github.com/mit-plv/fiat-crypto https://github.com/mit-plv/fiat-crypto
  - ghoward 6y ago
    Thank you for your kind words and the links!

ghoward 6y ago

Author here. If you read deeper into the post, I do, in fact, talk about how supporting those less well-known architectures is important. Edit: Also, those arguments were made plenty by others, so I didn't feel a need to rehash them much.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
(note: the original comment has been rewritten) > If you read deeper into the post I did skim the entire post, but the discussion on supporting alternative computer architectures was significantly shorter than the issue of memory safety, or Rust or Zig as languages. > Also, those arguments were made plenty by others, so I didn't feel a need to rehash them much. Fair enough. BTW, I agree with you that generating portable C is actually an interesting solution. Recently, there are a few successful projects like HACL* (Microsoft) [0], Fiat-Crypto (MIT CSAIL) [1] that are based on this idea - they use a high-level framework to synthesize human-unreadable but formally verified C code, effectively using C as a form of portable assembly. Both have been deployed in real-world systems like OpenSSH, Chromium and the Linux kernel with great success. [0] https://github.com/project-everest/hacl-star https://github.com/project-everest/hacl-star [1] https://github.com/mit-plv/fiat-crypto https://github.com/mit-plv/fiat-crypto
- ghoward 6y ago
  Thank you for your kind words and the links!