Hacker News Reader

Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

The problem that this language solves is that it automatically sorts out the memory usage for you. That isn't a problem for me; I've been programming in C for decades. But it is a problem for most python programmers who don't have a lick of C experience, but want to get C performance. It drastically lowers the barrier of entry.

View on HN

For what it counts, I have developed code for this kind of applications exclusively in C for ~5 years (let's say 20% of my working time). I still think that debugging a segfault that you could have avoided is not very productive and that motivated me to look into possible alternatives.

99% of the time a stack trace shows the culprit for a segfault straight away. No different than debugging Python.

if we are arguing that implementing a numerical algorithm in C is as easy as implementing it in Python - I would disagree. But maybe I am just wrong :)

The issue is debugging crashes, not productivity.

FWIW, I almost always use valgrind before a debugger, when tracking down segfaults. It doesn't catch everything, but 90% of the time, it gets me to the right region of code in a single run.

sure I use valgrind and gdb too - still hard to argue that a segfault is pleasant to debug though?

Good good, just wanted to advocate for my favorite tool there. But, in my experience, segfaults are usually the easiest bugs to resolve. Unlike a sign error in my math, they're impossible to miss!

That said, tooling to get rid of them entirely is not to be sneezed at :)

Yes and it will also prevent common memory management bugs that can lead to code injection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com