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Good thing those coders wading around what you seem to consider the shallow end of the coding pool are not writing things like our nameservers, web servers, ope
by evgen 17y ago
Good thing those coders wading around what you seem to consider the shallow end of the coding pool are not writing things like our nameservers, web servers, operating systems, or anything else important. Oh, that's right, they are. And they keep fucking up. Repeatedly.
When this keeps happening over and over again it is time to consider the possibility that the problem isn't the craftsman but the tool.
The advantage of using lots and lots of glue languages is that it forces the important bits to be loosely coupled, adds flexibility to the development and deployment process, and leads to systems that are easier to comprehend and reason about. The only things that should be opaque binaries are system libraries and VMs/runtimes. Everything else should be "glue".
- jacquesm 17y agoGiven the number of lines of C code out there the number of fuckups is a lot less than you'd expect. Because C is usually used in gatekeeper situations (operating systems, compilers, servers, network stacks) when there is a breach it is serious. I find it hard to conceive of a posix compliant OS written in a higher level language, especially because of the lack of deterministic behaviour when handling interrupts and allocating memory. C is mind numbingly simple at that level which is exactly why it is used in these situations. But every language makes it possible to write insecure code, C has its own unique challenges: It isn't that long ago that somebody managed to get an exploitable scenario out of UTF-8, it took me a long time looking at the code to see how it was even possible. In a higher level language that sort of thing is more difficult to achieve, that's for sure.