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You are unfairly comparing ancient C with modern rust - Try comparing modern C with modern rust to avoid making a straw man argument. Like I said, I don't even

You are unfairly comparing ancient C with modern rust - Try comparing modern C with modern rust to avoid making a straw man argument. Like I said, I don't even disagree, I still think you are just doing everyone a disservice with this line of reasoning. He said if he had used rust - I am saying if he had used C when rust was available 1. The bug would have been fixed. 2. He could have used valgrind. Modern C also has something called ubsan, and another thing called frama-C. These tools may be inferior to what rust has, but ignoring they exist or comparing 10+ year old C with modern rust is a bad faith argument.

kragen 4y ago
I agree, I don't think that a bug in GCC last millennium is a very strong argument for using Rust instead of C today, though such arguments do exist. However, I also don't think they particularly help you to distinguish a compiler bug from an error in your understanding of the language semantics, although they sure do help a lot with everyday errors. With respect to questions of inferiority or superiority, keep in mind that Valgrind and UBSan are only dynamic checkers; they don't help at all with errors that don't occur in your testing. Frama-C is a static checker more similar to Rust's capabilities, but much more limited, but also with cscope-like abilities for reverse-engineering existing source bases. The great advantage these three tools (and ASan) have is that you don't have to rewrite your C in Rust in order to use them.
- KsassPeuk 4y ago
  > but much more limited I agree and I disagree ;) I agree because having a type system that directly provides the guarantee that whole classes of runtime error cannot happen provides fast feedback during development at a low cost. I disagree because even in a press button (+ tuning) approach, you can prove things with Frama-C that the Rust compiler cannot prove (reason why there is runtime bound-checking, implementation defined behavior for integer overflow and so on in Rust). But also because you can prove much more advance properties than "just" absence of runtime errors.
  - kragen 4y ago
    And vice versa; Frama-C doesn't attempt to prove the absence of data races, last I checked.
    - KsassPeuk 4y ago
      In fact there exists a plugin that can do that but it is currently not free: https://frama-c.com/fc-plugins/mthread.html https://frama-c.com/fc-plugins/mthread.html (And by the way since it is not done by typing it is hard to use on legacy code)

kragen 4y ago

I agree, I don't think that a bug in GCC last millennium is a very strong argument for using Rust instead of C today, though such arguments do exist. However, I also don't think they particularly help you to distinguish a compiler bug from an error in your understanding of the language semantics, although they sure do help a lot with everyday errors. With respect to questions of inferiority or superiority, keep in mind that Valgrind and UBSan are only dynamic checkers; they don't help at all with errors that don't occur in your testing. Frama-C is a static checker more similar to Rust's capabilities, but much more limited, but also with cscope-like abilities for reverse-engineering existing source bases. The great advantage these three tools (and ASan) have is that you don't have to rewrite your C in Rust in order to use them.

KsassPeuk 4y ago
> but much more limited I agree and I disagree ;) I agree because having a type system that directly provides the guarantee that whole classes of runtime error cannot happen provides fast feedback during development at a low cost. I disagree because even in a press button (+ tuning) approach, you can prove things with Frama-C that the Rust compiler cannot prove (reason why there is runtime bound-checking, implementation defined behavior for integer overflow and so on in Rust). But also because you can prove much more advance properties than "just" absence of runtime errors.
- kragen 4y ago
  And vice versa; Frama-C doesn't attempt to prove the absence of data races, last I checked.
  - KsassPeuk 4y ago
    In fact there exists a plugin that can do that but it is currently not free: https://frama-c.com/fc-plugins/mthread.html https://frama-c.com/fc-plugins/mthread.html (And by the way since it is not done by typing it is hard to use on legacy code)