For example you could implement a string class in C++ using strlen, strdup etc. if you were feeling insane and it would probably be fine since you only use strdup once and then all the users of you class don't have to worry about getting it wrong.
If you write in C you have to use strdup every time you copy a string and there's no way you get it right 1000 times.
You'd be surprised how far large static buffers and snprintf will get you. Easy to deal with, no leaks, valgrind is happy...
You got me thinking about ways one could get strdup wrong:
- input is not a string -> possible UB
- input is a string, but the character encoding wasn't what you thought -> possible UB
- input is a string, but it was the pointer-plus-length kind -> possible UB
- input is modified by another thread -> possible UB
- strdup called from within a signal handler -> possible UB
- failure to handle error return values -> possible UB
- failure to free the memory when it's no longer needed -> memory leak
- freed the memory more than once -> possible UB
- used the memory after freeing it -> possible UB
I've personally seen several of these in real-world code.
- forget to #include string.h, so strdup is implicitly declared, so its return type is int, which implicitly converts to char*, so everything still compiles -> possible UB
Why not just build the ecosystem to do that and still have it all be “C”?
Why not some fixes to the standard and update then old but useful code, and work on better compilers?
This is what’s been confusing me for a while
If you can write safe enough C for the core of an interpreted language, why not abstract that into tools and patterns that generate better, safer C and learn how to do that over the last 30 years
Instead of JS and dozens of flavors, Python, ruby, lua...
DRY right?
My suspicion is “vanity projects generate a sense of novelty that’s easier to sell.”
But if the OS and bulk of the stack are “C inside anyway” why the extra nonsense?
Also what is the point of calling out on projects that are not using "cool" languages? You don't agree with the developer choice that is OK, probably that developer does not agree with your choice and has other priorities and if is an open source project probably he wants also to have fun while coding it.
Most people who write code in C are not that good at avoiding memory safety issues. The process is mostly to write some code, run it, then fix it until it doesn't crash immediately anymore.
Have you ever been the first person to run valgrind on a codebase? Lots of uninitialized reads and use-after-free issues will be flagged, because they don't normally crash the program and therefore go undetected without using an additional checker.
It can be fun to watch the error messages flow by, until you realize that now you have to file tickets for all of them. And some people won't even see the problem with those errors that don't crash the program, because potentially exploitable vulnerabilities are not as obviously bad as crashes.
Btw, I am not a C fan, in fact I think I have no favorite language, I use what I have to for the project
The time and effort to secure a C program against malicious input is absolutely huge. It would be quicker to write a secure dsl that using raw C. Which brings us back to scripting languages that have that implemented already as a library you load to run your requests through.
What could possibly go wrong
Uh... am I missing the joke? The C programs don't "call binary files", the C programs become the binary files through compilation.