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> still all manual That pretty much is the definition of C. It was designed to be a system language, that was "one step beyond" (my own Madness reference) the

> still all manual That pretty much is the definition of C. It was designed to be a system language, that was "one step beyond" (my own Madness reference) the assembler. It's a dangerous tool, and should be wielded by experts. The same goes for all kinds of similar stuff. And "experts" is kind of a darwinian thing. There's not really that many folks that can successfully wield it in large quantities (a certain cranky Finn comes to mind). There's a ton of folks that are surfing the Dunning-Kruger wave, that think they are up to it, but they tend to face-plant. For myself, I learned to do it right, but it was difficult, stressful work, and I don't miss it. Working in Swift is a joy. I don't have to worry about things like deallocations, and whatnot.

surajrmal 2y ago
I've never met an expert who writes c well all of the time, so I have been led to believe it's simply not possible. Folks with 20+ years of experience will still regularly write a use after free but which is not caught until it hits production. I'm not sure I've actually seen C code free of concurrency bugs. If it's possible it takes years of battle hardening with no feature work. Humans are prone to make mistakes and we need to use as many tools as possible to help us avoid making those mistakes. They are recently looking into introducing thread annotations for locks in the Linux kernel and I expect them to find lots of real bugs lurking in otherwise well maintained subsystems. I've rewritten swaths of code into rust and always seen it find a bug in the original code's design that we were lucky to never run into.
sim7c00 2y ago
haha every segfault puts me back down into the valley of despair xD. thats totally ok! higher level languages often make it so you can focus on the language mostly. C and assembly, i think, you need a lot of context. what is running the code, and how.

surajrmal 2y ago

I've never met an expert who writes c well all of the time, so I have been led to believe it's simply not possible. Folks with 20+ years of experience will still regularly write a use after free but which is not caught until it hits production. I'm not sure I've actually seen C code free of concurrency bugs. If it's possible it takes years of battle hardening with no feature work. Humans are prone to make mistakes and we need to use as many tools as possible to help us avoid making those mistakes. They are recently looking into introducing thread annotations for locks in the Linux kernel and I expect them to find lots of real bugs lurking in otherwise well maintained subsystems. I've rewritten swaths of code into rust and always seen it find a bug in the original code's design that we were lucky to never run into.

sim7c00 2y ago

haha every segfault puts me back down into the valley of despair xD. thats totally ok! higher level languages often make it so you can focus on the language mostly. C and assembly, i think, you need a lot of context. what is running the code, and how.