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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: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Saturday May 09 2015, @08:11AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Saturday May 09 2015, @08:11AM (#180675) Homepage
    I recently (2 yrs ago) went to a software/platform conference where there was a presentation by some early Rust adopters, and they leaked the information to the audience that there is still the ability to create invalid pointers in the language "if you know what you're doing". Which is precisely what I've been doing in C for 25 years.

    I guess if TSA is security theatre, then Rust is secure-code theatre.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:00PM (#180884)

    Oh please. Do you not wear seatbelts because it is still possible to die in a car accident even while wearing a seatbelt?

    Any language that allows direct memory access in any fashion has that 'problem.'

    But the idea is that the normal path is safe unlike C.

    You got that black and white geek thinking problem - the fact that it is possible to do something dangerous is not the same as it being easy to do something dangerous.