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I don't understand your false premises. I've never had C marketed to me as a language that promised safe, perfect code. It does what it says on the tin. Howeve

I don't understand your false premises. I've never had C marketed to me as a language that promised safe, perfect code. It does what it says on the tin. However I think you have some false premises: the Linux kernel is huge, has a fairly high turn-over in contributors, and is written in C. Hardly anyone "knows" the entire code base. I've yet to meet anyone who can even name all of the compile switches... some 1000+ of them. Yet it's hard to argue that it's not useful or impossible to contribute to. I'm not a genius and if I can figure it out I'm sure I can teach others. Yes, you can write bad code in C. I don't think you can blame C for human error. There are sins of commission and those of omission and the ANSI C specification documents them both quite well. Designing a language that protected an ignorant and uneducated programmer from making mistakes wasn't one of their goals I'm afraid.

pjmlp 12y ago
There is a big difference between writing C code and C code that is safe from exploits, even Linux isn't immune to it as the daily CVE updates show. http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/product_id-47/cvssscoremin-7/cvssscoremax-7.99/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/pr...
- agentultra 12y ago
  Correct and I don't find this surprising. While the separation of lint from the compiler might have been a mistake made as an early performance trade-off I don't really see how that was a false premise of the philosophy of trusting the programmer. Given the history of trade-offs made in the name of performance it doesn't seem like correctness and safety were big concerns. Maybe they are now and that's why I find the Mirage project interesting... but C still has its uses and I don't blame C for human error. The specification isn't terribly difficult to digest and the tooling is rather good these days.

pjmlp 12y ago

There is a big difference between writing C code and C code that is safe from exploits, even Linux isn't immune to it as the daily CVE updates show. http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/product_id-47/cvssscoremin-7/cvssscoremax-7.99/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/pr...

agentultra 12y ago
Correct and I don't find this surprising. While the separation of lint from the compiler might have been a mistake made as an early performance trade-off I don't really see how that was a false premise of the philosophy of trusting the programmer. Given the history of trade-offs made in the name of performance it doesn't seem like correctness and safety were big concerns. Maybe they are now and that's why I find the Mirage project interesting... but C still has its uses and I don't blame C for human error. The specification isn't terribly difficult to digest and the tooling is rather good these days.