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Comment by stephen82 | Hacker News Reader

I based my comment on Jens Gustedt's article [1] about adding a "defer" mechanism in standard C.

Clearly, the C committee works hard on improving the language and they are in the process to standardize important features, such as lambda functions, auto, typeof (like C++'s decltype more or less), and so forth.

In my humble opinion, "defer" can mild the buffer / memory overflow, but of course not permanently remedied it 100%; to me though it's better to have such mechanism than have nothing at all to protect you.

https://gustedt.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/a-defer-mechanism-f...

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Defer seems more like a solution to making cleanup easier and less error prone, preventing memory/fd/mutex leaks. It wouldn't significantly improve memory safety IMO. Adding a "slice" type with checked bounds (something basically every C codebase in existence ends up reimplementing somehow) would be a much greater improvement IMO.

But overall even though I still use C almost daily, I'm a bit skeptical of the committee's direction with these changes. They added half assed generics through macros, now a defer mechanism and a bunch of other stuff that's, IMO, out of scope for C. People have already tried to make a "better C" with all these bells and whistles, it's called C++, and it's still mostly backward compatible with C.

IMO C should be considered to be in "maintenance mode" these days. And again, my IRL job involves writing a lot of it, so it's not like I don't care about it.

Yup, there is a group of people who think that we should add brakes and lcd displays to horses because cars have these nifty things. For some reason, they don't understand it's ok that horses are not used for everyday travel anymore.

I hate the mess that c++ is. It started out with a object based programming paradigm with c like syntax. Then generics/templates were added. Then we have modern c++. It's 3 different languages crammed into one. The c++ committee has a serious case of nifty-itis.

grrr why are they introducing guard {} blocks? Would not want an extra level of {block} just for this.

__attribute__((cleanup)) gcc/clang extension already works without extra blocks. GLib has been using it for a while https://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2015/01/30/g_autoptr/

Defer doesn't even replace destructors, let alone resolve memory safety in C.

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