How does one start acquiring skills like these?
For example, when I'd review C code I'd look at the str???() function use. They are nearly always infested with bugs, usually either neglecting to add a terminator zero or neglecting to add sufficient storage for the terminating zero.
How can that language still be so popular?
That's what I meant, not that self hosted compliers don't exist.
Edit: I guess I should've at least asked myself if the question was rhetorical.
All I want is a menubar, a toolbar, a statusbar, and some dialog windows. I don't want fading transitions when I click a tab.
It's crazy that I'm forced to write header files just to have a menubar.
Zig 1.0 can't come soon enough.
Or... https://quickshell.org/ ?
No doubt there are valid reasons to use it, that is just the state of things they are unfortunately.
Back when I was musing about what D would be like, I happened across some BASIC code. I was drawn to the use of strings, which were so simple in BASIC. I decided that D would be a failure if strings weren't as easy to use as in BASIC.
And D strings turned out to be better than I'd dared hope!
I proposed an enhancement to C to get much of that benefit, but it received zero traction in the C community. Oh well.
The length of the string "Foo", when properly terminated, is 3. The minimum number of bytes needed [1] to represent that string properly is 4 (3+'\0'). The actual number of bytes used by that string is whatever you asked for and received when using "malloc".
[1] Assuming ASCII and 1-byte characters.
It's also an easy language to write a compiler for. At one point I counted over 30 C compilers available for DOS.
It takes a lot a passion and dedication to security and reverse engineering to get there.
I'd guess the curriculum is half reverse engineering and half reading any write-ups to see the attacks and areas of attack for inspiration