4 ms·

We can either blame the language and change it, or we can blame humans and change them. I think the former is a bit more realistic.

• ddingus 11y ago
  Or we can help the humans improve.
  • anon1385 11y ago
    You say that as if we even know what kind of human it would take to write safe C code. No specimen has yet been found.
    • ddingus 11y ago
      Helping the humans improve means better tools, education, etc... and this isn't a binary thing, in that compartmentalizing it into the people or the language ignores the cost of rewrites and the use / reuse value of all the code bodies out there right now. Dismissing this simply isn't practical. Augmenting C with things designed to work well with it can cut down on the use cases where C gets used and people aren't well equipped to do it. Great! That's improving the people while not stepping away from a massive investment and it's use value.
  • Retra 11y ago
    Then they die and you have to start over again. Humans haven't improved in at least 20,000 years.
  • seanwilson 11y ago
    It's not realistic in my opinion. Your web server and operating system for example will be built on a huge amount of C source code written by a huge amount of people; it's just not realistic to expect everyone to be careful enough that there's no buffer overflows in there.
    • ddingus 11y ago
      Well, we've peaked on CPU performance, single threaded right now. Little tiny gains, but nothing like going from 1 to 3 and now just a shade over 4Ghz. (fastest single threaded x86 I could find recently) Double that, and maybe we really can step away from things.