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Comment by absolut-dolt | Hacker News Reader

Imagine being this drunk on the kool-aid.

Just telling on yourself, "I can't write software without training wheels", "I couldn't be bothered to learn how pointers work", so flagrantly.

Rust is unspecified, lacks real battle testing, and lacks any substantial track record.

Comparisons to C are comical, and discussing Rust as being a C replacement as if it were a forgone conclusion is just... I mean I can't think of any way to phrase this that won't result in a ban - so use your imagination.

Rust is probably a fine language. A lot of y'all down the rabbit hole need a reality check though.

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You can't write software without training wheels either, you just think you can.

I know enough about C to know that I can't write it safely 100% of the time, especially when you introduce things like parsing untrusted input and threading. Thinking you can do this safely, and thinking you don't make mistakes suggests you actually don't know as much about C as you think you do.

There number of subtle and unexpected things that cause UB are pretty concerning. Most of our software that we rely on day-to-day is filled with subtle bugs, many of which will eventually be exploited and used for RCE and other nasty things. I don't understand how that couldn't concern you!

To be clear I don't think we should stop teaching C or anything that extreme. I don't think it should stop being used completely either. Mostly just that we should prefer safe languages when possible and practical, or use hardening features when we do use unsafe languages, like bounds checking for example. A lot of times I think we shouldn't even prefer rust, a lot of userspace software can be written in a GC'd language without issues.

> cease teaching it to every student

> Just telling on yourself, "I can't write software without training wheels"

I think both of these reactions go too far, in opposite directions. Of course the fact that C is difficult doesn't mean that we should stop teaching it. It could just as well mean the opposite, that we need to teach it better, certainly as long as it stays in widespread use. But at the same time, we should acknowledge that C is difficult even for experienced professionals, and that "not knowing how pointers work" isn't the main reason every large C and C++ codebase on earth has memory corruption vulnerabilities.

(I'm sure that's not literally true. Someone somewhere must've written a lot of perfect C code. But I think the usual posterchild for well-tested C is sqlite, and even sqlite has had memory corruption issues in the wild.)

Powering VSCode search engine, AWS Fargate infrastructure, ChromeOS and Android hypervisor infrastructure, Azure IoT, Firefox rendering engine, Android Bluetooth stack ....

Imagine being such a regressive, that you believe you can other can write "correct C", despite decades of evidence of the opposite.

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