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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?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @11:09PM
If you can't write reliable C code, then Rust isn't going to help you. If you can't figure out C, then you won't be able to figure out Rust. You'll just end up writing a lot of Rust code that works around the protections (limitations, really) that Rust tries to provide. You'll end up using Rust's unsafe keyword a lot. Your Rust code will be more dangerous than C code, because you and others will mistakenly think it's "safer" than C code when it really isn't. In fact, this poorly written Rust code could even be unsafer than poorly written C code.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:03AM
> If you can't write reliable C code, then Rust isn't going to help you.
If you aren't perfect no tool will make you perfect.
But none of us are perfect. Not even you.
Good tools can make us better. Even you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:34AM
C is a good tool. Rust is not a good tool.