Re:Rust things I miss in C
by pjmlp on Monday February 19, 2018 @10:09AM
(#16413287)
Apparently it is a known issue since 1979, yet it keeps being ignored.
> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.
Any feature that is outsourced to an external tool, has a very high probability of being ignored, and as such, yes it is a failure of the language's design.
> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
Any feature that is outsourced to an external tool, has a very high probability of being ignored, and as such, yes it is a failure of the language's design.