The cost of forsaking C

Re:The cost of forsaking C by kbart on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @07:17AM (#12642922)

"The amount of terrible C in the real world is enormous."

I'm sure you could say that about pretty much any programming language: "The amount of terrible X in the real world is enormous". There are also plenty of clean, nice, safe C code around (and any other language), there's no need to over-generalize ("Almost no one else does").

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by netheril96 on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @08:34AM (#12643227)

> I'm sure you could say that about pretty much any programming language: "The amount of terrible X in the real world is enormous".

But the damage is far greater in C. In other languages you won't have arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation just because the programmer is not careful. Nor will there be, in other languages, so many nondeterministic bugs that show up once in a blue moon.

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by falcolas on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @09:11AM (#12643476)

> In other languages you won't have arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation just because the programmer is not careful.

Sure you do. Remember the YAML fiasco with Ruby? How about the thousand-and-one RCE issues with PHP? eval isn't evil for no reason.

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by kbart on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @09:39AM (#12643662)

"In other languages you won't have arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation just because the programmer is not careful"

No, it's possible to make system insecure with pretty much any language if programmer is not careful. SQL injection, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and the list goes on..

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by 0xfeba on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @09:28AM (#12643575)

Yeah, I do web development. I've worked with javascript, PHP, and, sigh, classic ASP.

There's bad code everywhere. Some languages make it a bit easier, but it's really not the languages fault.

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by majewsky on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @10:18AM (#12643989)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by cwyers on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @09:37AM (#12643640)

There are very few programming languages where the total lines of code written is larger than the amount of bad C code written.

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by kbart on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @09:41AM (#12643677)

There are very programming languages where the total lines of code written is even comparable to C, so of course there is more of bad code too.

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by krylon on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @03:29PM (#12646981)

There are two kinds of languages: Those everyone hates and those nobody uses (according Bjarne Stroustrup, but I tend to agree... ;-) ).

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by MaulingMonkey on Thursday October 06, 2016 @08:01AM (#12651710)

There's a kernel of truth there, but I find myself regularly using languages which I hate much less.

If your best defense of a language is "well, at least people use it", that's a bad sign.

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Re:The cost of forsaking C by krylon on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:13PM (#12696451)

I always read Stroustrup's quote as saying, roughly speaking, that if nobody uses a language, nobody will notice its shortcomings, and if lots of people use it, lots of people will notice. In other words, popularity is no excuse for sucking, but if one is not popular, no one will notice how much one sucks.

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