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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

>in those days people used to smoke carcinogens for their taste, drive their own cars and treat mental disorders with an ice pick in the prefrontal cortex

Do you imagine a future where nobody is able to drive cars? Not even for fun?

I want all serious software that's written in C to be replaced with something like Rust, but I write C for fun. It's fun to do dangerous things. It's just bad to have danger as the modus operandi.

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I like doing dangerous things for fun too. (See also: my 50 mph scooter.)

I think we should mitigate risk in serious software in many holistic ways such as formal verification, fuzzing, anomaly detection, good/defensive coding standards, code reviews, and so forth. Such can be accomplished in C, but it maybe easier in languages such as Rust. The advantage of C is ubiquitous portability, which is necessary for widely-used libraries.

You're right there's a lot of tools out there to help with writing secure code in C. I suppose I feel safer knowing Rust enforces some memory safey, but that isn't guaranteed either -- you could just use unsafe{} blocks everywhere.

Sure, it’s important for a library to have C source code for portability. That doesn’t exclude implementing the code in another language (such as F*/FStar or Dafny) that has stronger out-of-the-box safety guarantees, then compiling it to portable C source code for distribution.

I don’t think many people begrudge people who ride horses for fun or write security software in assembly for fun.

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