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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: 2, Informative) by mvdwege on Saturday May 09 2015, @07:31PM

    by mvdwege (3388) on Saturday May 09 2015, @07:31PM (#180840)

    Having a new language for low-level programming, entirely designed with security in mind, would be awesome.

    What's wrong with Ada, aside from not being the 'Next Big Thing' praised by all the hipsters?

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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday May 09 2015, @08:16PM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Saturday May 09 2015, @08:16PM (#180853) Journal

    I never heard much about ADA, but after seeing your post I started reading about it. Thanks, I guess I will use it for my next AVR project :-)

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 1) by mvdwege on Saturday May 09 2015, @08:51PM

      by mvdwege (3388) on Saturday May 09 2015, @08:51PM (#180860)

      I dabble a bit in it; I'm a sysadmin by trade, programming professionally for me is mostly scripting languages.

      When I do have a hobby project that needs C levels of speed, I go for Ada though (note, it's not an acronym, it's named for Lady Ada Lovelace). It's a nice language, a tad verbose, using words instead of sigils for block delimiters, and it's very much tied up in its philosophy of 'everything is a type with defined behaviours', which accounts for its 'bondage-and-discipline' reputation.

      That aside, it's very elegant and fairly intuitive once you grasp the type system, and it has a really helpful community centering mostly around the USENET group comp.lang.ada. Where, surprisingly, even a hobbyist dabbler like me gets detailed and friendly answers from guys working on massive industrial projects, with zero condescension.

      The AVR runtime is especially good; I have a project on the backburner to hook up some motion sensors to an AVR board and build my own burglary alarm system.