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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps, but C is unsafe both in terms of types and memory (Which has to be considered if choosing C for a project)

HN users tend to parrot the safety line a lot because most people are working on web applications that store somewhat important user data, so gaining access to a remote machine due to a buffer overrun issue is catastrophic, but in games, especially in single player games, safety is less of an issue or even a non-issue. With a multiplayer networked game, cheating, attacks on servers and attacks on other players clients are a concern, but in a game that is entirely or mostly single player the worst outcome of unsafe code is that it crashes to desktop.

Ignoring the almost barbaric lack of abstraction in C, you could avoid a whole load of these bugs and make your customers not want your head on a spike at next to no cost by using a different language.

Nobody's complaining about the barbaric OS and network stack written in C. The safety nazis' bleating means little if they can't produce a viable alternative. Where are the high performance OSs written in Ada or whatever next big thing is?

What? Operating systems are big projects and the tools to write them safely (and open source) haven't existed for very long, so it's a question of manpower and effort not technology. C has almost no performance benefits these days, either, due to advances in compiler optimization; if anything it can be less as other languages can provide more static guarantees to the compiler to use when optimising.

That network stack written in C gave us heartbleed for example. If C arrays were bounds checked by default (e.g. they carry around their size), this could've been easily avoided at no runtime cost.

How can you honestly complain about people wanting more safety in software? If it's speed ("high performance") then you're probably implementing yourself in C (e.g. Bounds checking) something that is built in either at runtime or even statically as can be done in some cases.

What do you propose? Replacing the system stack with Ada?

Modern successors to C, such as Zig, and modern successors to C++, such as Rust, are still too young to be used for serious re-implementations of the lower layers.

Modern C++ would be a huge improvement to start with.

Rust is probably there, if under specified. D is definitely fine for writing operating systems (Question being whether to use druntime or not).

I know nothing about Zig, beyond having had a look and not being hugely impressed.

true, i'd never do a C89 game from scratch as a profesional project, but this is not a profesional project, it's more like a hobby-academic approach to the lower level of game engine design :D

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