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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 08 2015, @09:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the off-with-its-head dept.

Ladies and gentlemen, the C programming language. It’s a classic. It is blindingly, quicksilver fast, because it’s about as close to the bone of the machine as you can get. It is time-tested and ubiquitous. And it is terrifyingly dangerous.

The author's biggest issue with the C language seems to be security holes:

If you write code in C, you have to be careful not to introduce subtle bugs that can turn into massive security holes — and as anyone who ever wrote software knows, you cannot be perfectly careful all of the time.

The author claims that the Rust language is a modern answer to these issues and should replace C (and C++). It does look that Rust can run C code, so it looks like an interesting proposition. What do Soylent's coders think about this?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by pe1rxq on Friday May 08 2015, @09:35PM

    by pe1rxq (844) on Friday May 08 2015, @09:35PM (#180495) Homepage

    I would state it even more generic: The overwhelming majority of programmers will think they write safer code than average. They will manage to write crappy code in any language.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday May 08 2015, @11:29PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday May 08 2015, @11:29PM (#180556) Journal

    It is even more generic: The overwhelming majority of people will think they are above average in mastering most of their activities.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by naubol on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:55AM

      by naubol (1918) on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:55AM (#180627)

      The overwhelming majority of people think they're above average.

      • (Score: 4, Funny) by dyingtolive on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:02AM

        by dyingtolive (952) on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:02AM (#180649)

        The overwhelming majority.

        --
        Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:28AM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:28AM (#180578)

    True, but some languages *encourage* the writing of code that is insecure and hard to maintain. I've never considered C one of those languages though. Visual Basic, JavaScript, and a few others, yes, but not C. I've certainly seen my share of bad C and wouldn't choose it over some other languages for writing the most maintainable code, but I don't think it encourages the bad habits I see in other languages.