Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds is "extremely confident in his C skills". Doesn't stop hundreds of CVEs per year targeted at the kernel.

Sick of the C Apologism Task Force's idea that "if only rockstar programmers wrote code we wouldn't have any problems", completely ignoring the reality of software development and the evidence of 50 years of exploits.

View on HN

50 years of the same bugs over and over - the language might let you shoot yourself, but that doesn't abdicate the programmer from continuing education, code review, or testing. Seacord has a whole book on avoiding these; arguably anyone without it isn't doing all they can to write safe code, and might as well be considered uneducated. You can write unsafe code in any language if you don't know what's going on, or not a 'rockstar'

As for Linus, the kernel was written when he was a student, and I doubt he personally still makes the same low hanging fruit vulnerabilities that are the big issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com