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Death to C

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

Teckla writes in with an article promoting "Death to C":

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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:11PM (#180513)

    We called it Java.
    Oh wait python.
    Oh wait C#
    Oh wait PHP
    Oh wait javascript

    Oh wait and on and on.

    They are *all* riddled with security holes. What makes Rust special?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:18PM (#180518)

    Isn't it funny that almost all the wonderful examples on DailyWTF are of languages like the ones in your list, yet you barely find any examples of C (or even C++) code there. I wonder why...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:57AM (#180586)

      I don't know why, either, but I do know that the user makes a language secure, not the language itself. Stop suggesting otherwise.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @09:32AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @09:32AM (#180696)

        A language poses an entry barrier, a baby-language that runs no matter what kind of garbage you write and soft-fails will promote bad coding (see JavaScript).

    • (Score: 1) by dingus on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:15PM

      by dingus (5224) on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:15PM (#180823)

      because C/C++ has decades of thought put into it. I bet if you used the original C compiler it would behave oddly as well.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:32AM (#180581)

    It is less the language and more the use. When made with security in mind, just about any language will do. When security is an afterthought, every language will fail.