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Re:Getting Past C by kazinator on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @05:21PM (#13313718)
The advantage is that you're depending only on yourself and C. That third party static analysis tool can just be "grep". Or some mild text processing on the output of "nm" to validate that no object files (other than the allowed ones) have external refs to those symbols.
Re:Getting Past C by zem on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @10:10PM (#13315366)
I think it's a massive programming ecosystem blind spot that "depending on c" is seen as less of a burden than depending on rust
Re:Getting Past C by kazinator on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:12PM (#13315625)
How many chip and SoC vendors provide a Rust toolchain? In the case of C, the answer is basically "about as many as provide a toolchain".
Re:Getting Past C by pjmlp on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @03:12AM (#13316559)
In 2016, yes.

All the way through the 80's up to the early 90's, C toolchains only mattered to those that were working on UNIX workstations and servers. On home computers it was just, yet another language, with compilers generating slower code than junior Assembly programmers.

So of course Rust has to catch up a few decades of market use.

Re:Getting Past C by zem on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:37PM (#13315718)
sure, use c if that's all you can use, but if rust does target your system it adds no more overhead than c does.

tangentially, ats has had some success in that area since it compiles via c. but I agree that c is less work to get set up with.

Re:Getting Past C by jstimpfle on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @05:50PM (#13313980)
Or just disallow platform headers.
Re:Getting Past C by geofft on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @12:09PM (#13319985)
Again, if you're disallowing platform headers and writing tooling to make sure you're never calling libc, what's the advantage of writing in C? You have all the headaches of switching to a new language, with none of the features.

And, honestly, one of the features is "vibrant community of developers." Even if Go and Rust were bad languages, which they're not, they'd still be better choices than C-with-custom-in-house-restrictions-and-libc-wrappers, simply because of the communities around them. If you're writing in Rust, someone else has already written the safe C wrappers, and if they haven't, there's a community of people who will code-review your wrappers for safety and merge them into a centrally-maintained project, which is extremely useful.

Re:Getting Past C by jstimpfle on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @12:31PM (#13320200)
I'm not advocating use of C, just pointing out a simpler way to check dependencies.

To answer your question though, the advantage of using C is certainly not the notorious bad-habits standard library. C is fun and productive exactly where there's just you and some bits and bytes to bang around. Coding in the small. Not platforms and architectures.

Re:Getting Past C by kazinator on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @05:21PM (#13322653)
You can easily access external symbols in C without including a header. The external refs in an object file are the accurate info about what is referenced.
Re:Getting Past C by jstimpfle on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @07:26PM (#13323570)
Granted. Just as you can easily corrupt memory.

Just as you can statically link libc, without it showing up in the symbol table.