Re:The two types of C programmers (a provocative thesis)
by camgunz on Monday April 24, 2023 @09:31AM
(#35687414)
I'm an experienced C developer and I wouldn't say this. I'm pretty meticulous, I use as much tooling as I can, and I've still written over/underflows, memory corruption, threading heisenbugs, double frees, NULL derefs, etc. etc. etc. My defect rate has gone way down over the years, but that's probably 50/50 experience vs. an attenuation of my ambitions.
I think the proof is in the pudding here. I can't imagine using a messaging client or an email client written in C, and also there isn't much that is written in C anymore even if I wanted to: you're looking at Swift/Java/Kotlin/TypeScript/JavaScript/C#/Vala/Dart/Rust/Go, and maybe C++.
Is anyone writing production servers in C these days? It feels like they're 100% Go and Rust.
There are notable exceptions, in particular I'm thinking about OpenBSD. I think OS dev is a pretty niche area though, especially when you're talking about OpenBSD's wide platform support, so I think it's more the exception that proves the rule than anything.
I think the proof is in the pudding here. I can't imagine using a messaging client or an email client written in C, and also there isn't much that is written in C anymore even if I wanted to: you're looking at Swift/Java/Kotlin/TypeScript/JavaScript/C#/Vala/Dart/Rust/Go, and maybe C++.
Is anyone writing production servers in C these days? It feels like they're 100% Go and Rust.
There are notable exceptions, in particular I'm thinking about OpenBSD. I think OS dev is a pretty niche area though, especially when you're talking about OpenBSD's wide platform support, so I think it's more the exception that proves the rule than anything.