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C in software stacks is more like flame in kitchens. Fire is dangerous and bad for your health. Kitchen fires kill people, gas leaks kill people. It's possible

C in software stacks is more like flame in kitchens. Fire is dangerous and bad for your health. Kitchen fires kill people, gas leaks kill people. It's possible to do without. But billions of people around the world cook with flame and do OK. All our ancestors did, and here we are. There will always be professional kitchens that use gas/flame (almost all of them). And it'll always be possible for your food to catch on fire anyway, if you cook it wrong. Unlike asbestos insulation in houses, or flame in your personal kitchen, you actually can't avoid C in your software stack. Do you use Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, or macOS, or Windows? Do you use Postgres or MySql or sqlite, or maybe redis or memcached? How about a language like Python or JS or Java or Ruby or Lua? Do you use rust? guess what the business-end of that compiler is written in! so you dabble at the tippy-top of the stack in some language like rust or go, so what?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Unlike asbestos insulation in houses, you actually can't avoid C in your software stack You know what, construction industry could have made the same argument - oh look, all insulation suppliers use asbestos, the factory is built out of it too, its everywhere in the supply chain, you can't actually avoid asbestos if you ate trying to build a house, so we should learn to live with it. You can't avoid fossil fuels, you gave to use fossil fuels to produce a solar panel, so dreaming about clean energy is pointless. The difference is that some i industries pull the finger out of their bum and clean up their act, and some i dustries, like our's, does not. Even thoigh perfectly serviceable alternatives exist.