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What in your mind are the fundamental issues of C? Because memory safety clearly isn't one of them as brand new systems languages are being written without it (

by Spivak 1y ago

What in your mind are the fundamental issues of C? Because memory safety clearly isn't one of them as brand new systems languages are being written without it (Zig).

steveklabnik 1y ago
Absolutely zero shade to Zig, because it is still pre-1.0, but if you look at which new systems languages have gained wide adoption recently, instead of languages that are just created, you end up with Rust. And the stated reason industry is adopting it is memory safety.
- rc00 1y ago
  What adoption? Blog posts? Echo chambers? Rust peaked. The hype pushers don't want to believe it but that is the reality. Absolutely zero shade to Rust.
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cwood-sdf 1y ago
zig is trying its best to also be memory safe (at runtime, if you want it) whereas c is stuck in the past (you can add on sanitizers, but they arent built into the language)
antonvs 1y ago
Memory safety is certainly a pretty fundamental problem with C. Zig actually addresses some of those issues, even if it's not fully "memory safe" by definition. Besides, the fact that new systems languages are being written without memory safety doesn't make it a good idea. People write all sorts of languages for all sorts of reasons. C's lack of memory safety covers a broad range of concerns, including manual memory management, unrestricted pointers, null pointers (Tony Hoare's "billion dollar mistake"), buffer overflows, use-after-free, integer promotions, and so on. Its weak type system is another fundamental limitation, closely related to its limited support for abstraction. The weakness of the standard library reflects this. The weak type system means that the static guarantees it provides are minimal. There were excuses for all this in 1975, there aren't any more. Undefined behavior is more of an issue in C than in most languages. Again, not something you ideally want in a systems language. Language-level concurrency support is virtually nonexistent. Use of textual preprocessing, with limited semantic integration, as a language feature. Aside from the effects on the meaning of source code, it also makes building C programs more complex. And again, the reason C23 hasn't addressed any of this significantly is because of fundamental limitations in the nature of the language. You can't "fix" these things without developing a new language.
- uecker 1y ago
  I think this narrative of the unfixable fundamental flaws in C is a lot of nonsense. There are certainly a lot of dangerous aspects, but most are rather easily avoided. Rust has an advantage, with temporal memory safety. I do not think C++, Zig, or Go have a fundamental advantage. There is certainly a lot of bad C code out, but instead of changing language, you could also just write modern C code.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    > There are certainly a lot of dangerous aspects, but most are rather easily avoided. This is an almost childish claim. If they're so easily avoided, how do you explain the enormously long list of CVEs for C and C++ programs? > I do not think C++, Zig, or Go have a fundamental advantage. We agree on that. They objectively do not. They're all an attempt to continue the C legacy. Go specifically is particularly ridiculous, having been designed quite recently by people from the 1970s who steadfastly refused to learn any lessons from the last 50 years of programming language development. To be clear: I'm from the 1970s as well. I learned FORTRAN in 1977. But unlike the designers of Go, I didn't allow my understanding of programming language design to stagnate in the 1970s. I learned things. I studied things. I discovered things. Do you believe that C is the ultimate in system programming language design? If you agree that it's not, then what are we arguing about exactly?
    - donkeybeer 1y ago
      How many users and eyes do these "low CVE" Rust, Go whatever projects have? While I'd hardly disagree C and even C++ is lacking in memory safety compared to some newer languages, you are forgetting to normalize for sheer scale and userbase. If you have a Go project with the scale of popularity of Linux or Chrome or so on, then we can compare bug counts directly.

by Spivak 1y ago

What in your mind are the fundamental issues of C? Because memory safety clearly isn't one of them as brand new systems languages are being written without it (Zig).

steveklabnik 1y ago

Absolutely zero shade to Zig, because it is still pre-1.0, but if you look at which new systems languages have gained wide adoption recently, instead of languages that are just created, you end up with Rust. And the stated reason industry is adopting it is memory safety.

rc00 1y ago
What adoption? Blog posts? Echo chambers? Rust peaked. The hype pushers don't want to believe it but that is the reality. Absolutely zero shade to Rust.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

cwood-sdf 1y ago

zig is trying its best to also be memory safe (at runtime, if you want it) whereas c is stuck in the past (you can add on sanitizers, but they arent built into the language)

antonvs 1y ago

Memory safety is certainly a pretty fundamental problem with C. Zig actually addresses some of those issues, even if it's not fully "memory safe" by definition. Besides, the fact that new systems languages are being written without memory safety doesn't make it a good idea. People write all sorts of languages for all sorts of reasons. C's lack of memory safety covers a broad range of concerns, including manual memory management, unrestricted pointers, null pointers (Tony Hoare's "billion dollar mistake"), buffer overflows, use-after-free, integer promotions, and so on. Its weak type system is another fundamental limitation, closely related to its limited support for abstraction. The weakness of the standard library reflects this. The weak type system means that the static guarantees it provides are minimal. There were excuses for all this in 1975, there aren't any more. Undefined behavior is more of an issue in C than in most languages. Again, not something you ideally want in a systems language. Language-level concurrency support is virtually nonexistent. Use of textual preprocessing, with limited semantic integration, as a language feature. Aside from the effects on the meaning of source code, it also makes building C programs more complex. And again, the reason C23 hasn't addressed any of this significantly is because of fundamental limitations in the nature of the language. You can't "fix" these things without developing a new language.

uecker 1y ago
I think this narrative of the unfixable fundamental flaws in C is a lot of nonsense. There are certainly a lot of dangerous aspects, but most are rather easily avoided. Rust has an advantage, with temporal memory safety. I do not think C++, Zig, or Go have a fundamental advantage. There is certainly a lot of bad C code out, but instead of changing language, you could also just write modern C code.
- antonvs 1y ago
  > There are certainly a lot of dangerous aspects, but most are rather easily avoided. This is an almost childish claim. If they're so easily avoided, how do you explain the enormously long list of CVEs for C and C++ programs? > I do not think C++, Zig, or Go have a fundamental advantage. We agree on that. They objectively do not. They're all an attempt to continue the C legacy. Go specifically is particularly ridiculous, having been designed quite recently by people from the 1970s who steadfastly refused to learn any lessons from the last 50 years of programming language development. To be clear: I'm from the 1970s as well. I learned FORTRAN in 1977. But unlike the designers of Go, I didn't allow my understanding of programming language design to stagnate in the 1970s. I learned things. I studied things. I discovered things. Do you believe that C is the ultimate in system programming language design? If you agree that it's not, then what are we arguing about exactly?
  - donkeybeer 1y ago
    How many users and eyes do these "low CVE" Rust, Go whatever projects have? While I'd hardly disagree C and even C++ is lacking in memory safety compared to some newer languages, you are forgetting to normalize for sheer scale and userbase. If you have a Go project with the scale of popularity of Linux or Chrome or so on, then we can compare bug counts directly.