7 ms·

Was there any study done to the (un)reliability of C? I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++. The sole excep

by kmm 13y ago

Was there any study done to the (un)reliability of C? I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++. The sole exceptions are Anki and Gentoo's portage system, both Python. And I'm pretty sure the reason portage is so extremely slow is because it is in Python (I've checked, it's not I/O-bound). And Anki is some very unreliable software. In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++.

betterunix 13y ago
"I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++." How confident are you that that software will work as expected? How much are you willing to bet? The fact that a language is popular does not prove that the language is good, nor that it should be used, nor that it is not causing us problems. Just the other day on HN, there was an article about a massive number of vulnerabilities in X11 applications -- all resulting from problems that you have in C and C++ but not in higher-level languages. Entire classes of bugs that are common problems in C are just not an issue in other languages. Sure, it is possible to write unreliable code in high-level languages. It is just a lot easier to write unreliable C code, and C programmers are much more likely to do so (even those with years of experience).
- Jabbles 13y ago
  "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" Bjarne Stroustrup http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that Of course, that just dismisses the criticism of the language. But to say that it "should [not] be used" ignores the current landscape of engineers, employers and problems.
  - pjscott 13y ago
    That quote is always annoying, because it applies equally well to all criticisms of any programming language in active use, but not all criticisms are created equal. A useful heuristic would actually help distinguish between reasonable criticism and inevitable kvetching.
- asynchronous13 13y ago
  Perhaps you should face your fears and learn C ;-)
- kmm 13y ago
  I'm not betting anything. I'm just saying that it seems to me the advantages of higher level languages do not outweigh the disadvantages. Most of the software I use was written relatively recently, which means other program languages were available, yet C was chosen over them.
doktrin 13y ago
> And I'm pretty sure the reason portage is so extremely slow is because it is in Python (I've checked, it's not I/O-bound) I was under the impression portage was "slow" (relative to other package management tools) due to the fact that it built everything from source (for which it uses make). Where is the Python bottleneck? > In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++. What constitutes "big"? There are a few large desktop projects that run on the JVM, for instance.
- eckzow 13y ago
  It's been a while since I used Gentoo, but most of the serious users consider build-from-source as a feature and don't penalize portage for that. I believe your parent is referring to the sometimes annoyingly long dependency computation time of something like emerge -uDN world.
- kmm 13y ago
  > I was under the impression portage was "slow" (relative to other package management tools) due to the fact that it built everything from source (for which it uses make). Where is the Python bottleneck? I was talking about the overhead of making the list of packages to update/install. Pretending to install a simple package takes 7 seconds. Pretending to update takes 13 seconds. That's a very long time, because I might want to review the list of packages and make some changes, and every time I have to wait 13 seconds. The compiling part is true, but that is not supervised.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure the 'emerge -pv' performance is IO bound and would not be significantly improved by writing it in C.
pjmlp 13y ago
Just three, ask for more if you wish: The original version of Skype was done in Delphi. The first versions of Mac OS were done in Apple Pascal. Photoshop was originally done in Apple Pascal.
- kmm 13y ago
  To be honest, I was looking for some more recent software. Skype is 10 years old and both Mac OS and Photoshop are both decades old. And Pascal is not "better" than C, it is not a high level language.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Funny as someone that started coded back in the day Assembly was enterprise coding, my understanding of a high level language is a bit different than yours. You asked for desktop software without any mention of time.
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      The implication is that his test is a proof of C's merit. Merit is time-sensitive, in that if software is converted to another language, that language is more profitable/efficient for that software. Therefore, the implication is also that systems converted to C demonstrate C's merit, because it's been decades since they were actually in the language you speak of.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        What can I say. I am older than C and remember the days when it was used only as the UNIX system's language. UNIX's success made people want to port UNIX's tooling for their home computers, this lead to the spread of C implementations outside UNIX. Had UNIX been written in language XYZ, the article would be called "Learn XYZ". Merit is relative.
- asynchronous13 13y ago
  1) the original UI for Skype was written in Delphi. The core functionality is, and has always been written in C/C++. 2) Mac OS is not a desktop application. 3) Adobe Photoshop is all C/C++ now. They converted it to C/C++ because they decided that was a better choice. Its tough to sell that as a case for a major desktop application not in c/c++.
philwelch 13y ago
Eclipse is made with Java.
Teckla 13y ago
In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++. I find your requirements odd and vague (why big? why desktop?), but speaking just for myself: Eclipse, jEdit, CyberDuck -- all written in Java. I use plenty of applications written in C and C++ too, of course; but I think that's largely due to (1) inertia in the application development industry, and (2) it took a while for runtime environments like the JVM to perform well, so they got a bad reputation early on that's no longer really deserved -- but the reputation persists in the minds of many developers.
- kmm 13y ago
  My parent's post said C was bad and software shouldn't be written in it. So I retort by talking about desktop software because this is an area where C and C++ rule supreme. I specified big because big software projects carry more merit. A calculator written in your favourite language might be pretty handy, but it doesn't show your language can be used for real software. I use some Python scripts, but I don't see it in a lot of serious applications, apart from the dead slow portage and Anki, which is the most buggy software on my machine. I don't think inertia is a real factor. Most software I use is brand spanking new. Google Chrome, to give an example, is barely five years old! Most of the other software I use is from the GNOME project, which has seen a major rewrite with GNOME 3 about two years ago, where they could have chosen to write it in a high-level language. Yet practically all of it is still in C, with a Javascript layer for the Shell (which I both love and loathe). And speed is interesting. It might be due to old compilers/interpreters, bad programming habits or oldness, but all non C/C++/C# software I have ever used, was dead slow.
  - imissmyjuno 13y ago
    Nobody is doubting there's plenty of great software written in C. That doesn't mean we should choose C for all the new software we write, though. I'm sure one will find slow and unreliable code written in C if they look hard enough..
  - simonster 13y ago
    Google Chrome is based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, which has been around since 1998. Moreover, Chrome depends on system and external libraries that provide C/C++ headers. Any viable alternative would need to work with C/C++ headers without needing large amounts of glue code, which isn't necessarily easy. People still use C not because all of their code is so performance-sensitive that they can't deal with the overhead of bounds checks and garbage collection, but because there still aren't reasonably high-performance alternatives can easily integrate with existing codebases. Go and Rust are two promising contenders in this regard, but the former has only recently achieved C-level performance, and the latter is still not ready for production use. With that said, Mozilla is writing a browser in Rust (Servo), which shows their aspirations.
simonster 13y ago
A major part of Firefox (hundreds of KLOC) is written in JavaScript. While the layout and network code is all C++, most parts that aren't performance-critical and don't need to interact directly with the OS are JS. This includes all of the high-level UI code.
- lttlrck 13y ago
  And JS VM is written in C.

by kmm 13y ago

betterunix 13y ago

"I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++." How confident are you that that software will work as expected? How much are you willing to bet? The fact that a language is popular does not prove that the language is good, nor that it should be used, nor that it is not causing us problems. Just the other day on HN, there was an article about a massive number of vulnerabilities in X11 applications -- all resulting from problems that you have in C and C++ but not in higher-level languages. Entire classes of bugs that are common problems in C are just not an issue in other languages. Sure, it is possible to write unreliable code in high-level languages. It is just a lot easier to write unreliable C code, and C programmers are much more likely to do so (even those with years of experience).

Jabbles 13y ago
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" Bjarne Stroustrup http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that Of course, that just dismisses the criticism of the language. But to say that it "should [not] be used" ignores the current landscape of engineers, employers and problems.
- pjscott 13y ago
  That quote is always annoying, because it applies equally well to all criticisms of any programming language in active use, but not all criticisms are created equal. A useful heuristic would actually help distinguish between reasonable criticism and inevitable kvetching.
asynchronous13 13y ago
Perhaps you should face your fears and learn C ;-)
kmm 13y ago
I'm not betting anything. I'm just saying that it seems to me the advantages of higher level languages do not outweigh the disadvantages. Most of the software I use was written relatively recently, which means other program languages were available, yet C was chosen over them.

doktrin 13y ago

> And I'm pretty sure the reason portage is so extremely slow is because it is in Python (I've checked, it's not I/O-bound) I was under the impression portage was "slow" (relative to other package management tools) due to the fact that it built everything from source (for which it uses make). Where is the Python bottleneck? > In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++. What constitutes "big"? There are a few large desktop projects that run on the JVM, for instance.

eckzow 13y ago
It's been a while since I used Gentoo, but most of the serious users consider build-from-source as a feature and don't penalize portage for that. I believe your parent is referring to the sometimes annoyingly long dependency computation time of something like emerge -uDN world.
kmm 13y ago
> I was under the impression portage was "slow" (relative to other package management tools) due to the fact that it built everything from source (for which it uses make). Where is the Python bottleneck? I was talking about the overhead of making the list of packages to update/install. Pretending to install a simple package takes 7 seconds. Pretending to update takes 13 seconds. That's a very long time, because I might want to review the list of packages and make some changes, and every time I have to wait 13 seconds. The compiling part is true, but that is not supervised.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure the 'emerge -pv' performance is IO bound and would not be significantly improved by writing it in C.

pjmlp 13y ago

Just three, ask for more if you wish: The original version of Skype was done in Delphi. The first versions of Mac OS were done in Apple Pascal. Photoshop was originally done in Apple Pascal.

kmm 13y ago
To be honest, I was looking for some more recent software. Skype is 10 years old and both Mac OS and Photoshop are both decades old. And Pascal is not "better" than C, it is not a high level language.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Funny as someone that started coded back in the day Assembly was enterprise coding, my understanding of a high level language is a bit different than yours. You asked for desktop software without any mention of time.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    The implication is that his test is a proof of C's merit. Merit is time-sensitive, in that if software is converted to another language, that language is more profitable/efficient for that software. Therefore, the implication is also that systems converted to C demonstrate C's merit, because it's been decades since they were actually in the language you speak of.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      What can I say. I am older than C and remember the days when it was used only as the UNIX system's language. UNIX's success made people want to port UNIX's tooling for their home computers, this lead to the spread of C implementations outside UNIX. Had UNIX been written in language XYZ, the article would be called "Learn XYZ". Merit is relative.
asynchronous13 13y ago
1) the original UI for Skype was written in Delphi. The core functionality is, and has always been written in C/C++. 2) Mac OS is not a desktop application. 3) Adobe Photoshop is all C/C++ now. They converted it to C/C++ because they decided that was a better choice. Its tough to sell that as a case for a major desktop application not in c/c++.

philwelch 13y ago

Eclipse is made with Java.

Teckla 13y ago

In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++. I find your requirements odd and vague (why big? why desktop?), but speaking just for myself: Eclipse, jEdit, CyberDuck -- all written in Java. I use plenty of applications written in C and C++ too, of course; but I think that's largely due to (1) inertia in the application development industry, and (2) it took a while for runtime environments like the JVM to perform well, so they got a bad reputation early on that's no longer really deserved -- but the reputation persists in the minds of many developers.

kmm 13y ago
My parent's post said C was bad and software shouldn't be written in it. So I retort by talking about desktop software because this is an area where C and C++ rule supreme. I specified big because big software projects carry more merit. A calculator written in your favourite language might be pretty handy, but it doesn't show your language can be used for real software. I use some Python scripts, but I don't see it in a lot of serious applications, apart from the dead slow portage and Anki, which is the most buggy software on my machine. I don't think inertia is a real factor. Most software I use is brand spanking new. Google Chrome, to give an example, is barely five years old! Most of the other software I use is from the GNOME project, which has seen a major rewrite with GNOME 3 about two years ago, where they could have chosen to write it in a high-level language. Yet practically all of it is still in C, with a Javascript layer for the Shell (which I both love and loathe). And speed is interesting. It might be due to old compilers/interpreters, bad programming habits or oldness, but all non C/C++/C# software I have ever used, was dead slow.
- imissmyjuno 13y ago
  Nobody is doubting there's plenty of great software written in C. That doesn't mean we should choose C for all the new software we write, though. I'm sure one will find slow and unreliable code written in C if they look hard enough..
- simonster 13y ago
  Google Chrome is based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, which has been around since 1998. Moreover, Chrome depends on system and external libraries that provide C/C++ headers. Any viable alternative would need to work with C/C++ headers without needing large amounts of glue code, which isn't necessarily easy. People still use C not because all of their code is so performance-sensitive that they can't deal with the overhead of bounds checks and garbage collection, but because there still aren't reasonably high-performance alternatives can easily integrate with existing codebases. Go and Rust are two promising contenders in this regard, but the former has only recently achieved C-level performance, and the latter is still not ready for production use. With that said, Mozilla is writing a browser in Rust (Servo), which shows their aspirations.

simonster 13y ago

A major part of Firefox (hundreds of KLOC) is written in JavaScript. While the layout and network code is all C++, most parts that aren't performance-critical and don't need to interact directly with the OS are JS. This includes all of the high-level UI code.

lttlrck 13y ago
And JS VM is written in C.