Re:Getting Past C
by thesmallestcat on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @07:17PM
(#13314555)
I'm no C expert, but those do two different things (fixed vs. dynamic length, stack vs. heap alloc). And the first one is safe with strncpy, right? Though I don't know why you'd ever have code like this unless you like undefined behavior and want to return the array. The second example seems fine and not particularly difficult or verbose.
1. Buffer overflows aren't considered the most insidious issue in C nowadays. That award would probably go to use after free, which is not so easy to fix.
2. In C, it is easier and faster to do the wrong thing. Compare "char buf[256]; strcpy(buf, foo); ..." to "array_t buf = array_create(strlen(foo) + 1); strcpy(buf.ptr, foo); ... array_destroy(buf);"
3. Buffer overflows do not in fact come up routinely in Rust the way they do in C.