Re:This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem
by pas on Thursday December 02, 2021 @04:55PM
(#29423259)
Memory is cheap. (But not free of course!) Scala, Kotlin, and Java exist. The HotSpot VM is amazing, its JIT is mindblowing. (Probaly even TS + V8 would do the job for high level stuff.)
It's complete nonsense that C is needed for accessing the HW. High level languages can do low-level bibanging just fine.
So yes, there's a good reason, but that is inertia. Literally too big to fail, so it keeps on living. Even if we tomorrow outlawed C, drafted people to start rewriting things in a memory-managed language, and so on, it would take decades to get rid of it.
It's complete nonsense that C is needed for accessing the HW. High level languages can do low-level bibanging just fine.
So yes, there's a good reason, but that is inertia. Literally too big to fail, so it keeps on living. Even if we tomorrow outlawed C, drafted people to start rewriting things in a memory-managed language, and so on, it would take decades to get rid of it.