Serious Chrome zero-day

Re:Serious Chrome zero-day by setr on Thursday March 07, 2019 @10:10AM (#19328592)

A monopoly is naturally self-sustaining. It's absurd to think there couldn't possibly be a "better way", that C is somehow perfect in its niche (that all-encompassing niche, that once covered anything and everything that wasn't grabbed by perl); But major experience in developing OS's is with C.. the knowledge, experience, tooling, etc depends on C, because C already has complete and total dominance in the area.

It's difficult to consider working on OS's in not-C, because C owns the market and ecosystem, and everything revolves around it.

But that's certainly a different reason than the absurd imagination that it's impossible to produce a language with stronger guarantees on bug-prone programming tasks (there are many languages that do, some with GC, some with stricter typing, some with static lifetime tracking, and so it goes on). That our CS theorists are so utterly incompetent that they couldn't manage to come up with even a single useful improvement to the divine language, 50 years after the great wizard Thompson etched its wisdom into a core dump

Let's quit pretending that (continued) market dominance correlates to (continued) quality.

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Re:Serious Chrome zero-day by sureaboutthis on Thursday March 07, 2019 @02:59PM (#19331665)

If there is a safer, cheaper, faster language to use, someone would be using it. For another language to take C's place, it needs to be at least two of those--maybe all three and more. Market dominance, if there is such a thing in this area, has nothing to do with it.

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Re:Serious Chrome zero-day by setr on Thursday March 07, 2019 @03:37PM (#19332100)

Market dominance can be read as ecosystem dominance, and that reading obviously exists. More specifically, the C language could be completely worthless on its own, but made good enough to be usable through tooling (eg fuzzing, valgrind, etc). As it turns out, theres a lot more involved in writing an OS than just the language; and its all so conjoined at the hip, enough so that it makes it quite difficult to change just the language. But this is an argument that despite C’s flaws, its existence is on the whole preferrable to a total rewrite.

>If there is a safer, cheaper, faster language to use, someone would be using it

someone is using other languages. Urbit, redox, lisp machines, mirage are all not-c systems/OSs. But you aren’t talking about writing an OS, you’re talking about writing a popular OS. Of which there are basically three worth noting, all of which happen to have sprung up around a similar timeframe, coincidentally when C was at its most popular...

You seem to have confused the software industry for some kind of meritocracy... it is not. It follows trends harder than than the fashion industry. Look ...anywhere... for examples: OS, DB, language, game design and tooling, the AI winters, the .com crash, everything about the web, HN itself, etc. Hell, your own argument is just bandwagoning, with nothing about the technical merit (smarter people than I are using it, thus I should... is exactly how we end up in this state)

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