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I write C every day and wrote C compiler. I know all all the issues it has very well, but it still a relatively simple language. It also not that difficult to p
by uecker 2y ago
I write C every day and wrote C compiler. I know all all the issues it has very well, but it still a relatively simple language. It also not that difficult to parse. The lexer hack is interesting, because you can almost get away with using a context-free lexer, but you need this one hack. But this is not really a problem. People failing to read c declarations is also not the same thing as complexity, although I would agree that those are weird. Null-terminated strings have safety issues, but this is also not the same thing as complexity.
- uecker 2y agoI would argue that the problem of C is something else: It does not provide enough functionality out of the box. So instead of using some safe abstraction, people open-code their string manipulation or buffer management. This is then cumbersome and error prone, leading to complexity of the solution and safety issues which would could easily be avoided.
- sylware 2y agoI prefer a simple computer language with many real-life alternative compilers, and on the long run: the code will be hardened, where appropriate, because it is not cheap, over time. And we must not forget that, 100% "safe" high level code should never be trusted to be compiled into 100% safe machine code.