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Correctness is not just about security. And the threat environment to which a program may eventually be exposed is not always obvious up front. Also, no: that'

by dgacmu 2y ago

Correctness is not just about security. And the threat environment to which a program may eventually be exposed is not always obvious up front. Also, no: that's only true for some kinds of programs. Rust, c++, and go all have a much easier ecosystem for things like data structures and more complex libraries that make writing many programs much easier than in C. The only place I find C still useful over one of the other three is embedded, mostly because of the ecosystem, and rust is catching up there also. (This is somewhat ironic, because I teach a class in C. It remains a useful language when you want someone to quickly see the relationship between the line of code they wrote and the resulting assembly, but it's also fraught - undefined behavior lurks in many places and adds a lot of pain. I will one day switch the class to rust, but I inherited the C version and it takes a while.)

johnisgood 2y ago
> much easier ecosystem for things like data structures and more complex libraries that make writing many programs much easier than in C. So many people have implemented those data structures though, and they are available freely and openly, you can choose to your liking, i.e. ohash, or uthash, or khash, etc. and that is only for a hash table. Those complex libraries are out there, too, for C, obviously. The reason for why it is not in the standard library is obvious enough: there are many ways to implement those data structures, and there is no one size that fits all.
- tcfhgj 2y ago
  I followed the discussion about Rust in Linux. One comment talked about not using a (faster) B-Tree instead of a AVL-tree in C, because of the complexity (thus maintenance burden and risk of mistakes) it would add to the code. They were happy to use a B-Tree in Rust though
- dgacmu 2y ago
  There are! But composability is easier in the languages that have generics/templates/etc. There's less passing around of function pointers and writing of custom comparator functions, using something like binary search or sort as an example, and the fact that those comparators can be inlined can often make the rust or C++ version faster than the "as simple to write" C version. Obviously, all of these languages are capable of doing anything the others can. Turing complete is turing complete. But compare the experience of writing a multithreaded program that has, as part of it, an embedded HTTP server that provides statistics as it runs. It's painful in C, fairly annoying in C++ unless you match well to some existing framework, pretty straightforward in Rust, and kinda trivial in Go.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    When it comes to multithreaded programs, I much prefer Go over C, too. :)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

by dgacmu 2y ago

johnisgood 2y ago

> much easier ecosystem for things like data structures and more complex libraries that make writing many programs much easier than in C. So many people have implemented those data structures though, and they are available freely and openly, you can choose to your liking, i.e. ohash, or uthash, or khash, etc. and that is only for a hash table. Those complex libraries are out there, too, for C, obviously. The reason for why it is not in the standard library is obvious enough: there are many ways to implement those data structures, and there is no one size that fits all.

tcfhgj 2y ago
I followed the discussion about Rust in Linux. One comment talked about not using a (faster) B-Tree instead of a AVL-tree in C, because of the complexity (thus maintenance burden and risk of mistakes) it would add to the code. They were happy to use a B-Tree in Rust though
dgacmu 2y ago
There are! But composability is easier in the languages that have generics/templates/etc. There's less passing around of function pointers and writing of custom comparator functions, using something like binary search or sort as an example, and the fact that those comparators can be inlined can often make the rust or C++ version faster than the "as simple to write" C version. Obviously, all of these languages are capable of doing anything the others can. Turing complete is turing complete. But compare the experience of writing a multithreaded program that has, as part of it, an embedded HTTP server that provides statistics as it runs. It's painful in C, fairly annoying in C++ unless you match well to some existing framework, pretty straightforward in Rust, and kinda trivial in Go.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  When it comes to multithreaded programs, I much prefer Go over C, too. :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]