Comment by __float | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __float | Hacker News Reader

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> Yet software developed in C, with all of the foibles of its string routines, has been sold and running for years with trillions of USD is total sales.

This doesn't seem very relevant. The same can be said of countless other bad APIs: see years of bad PHP, tons of memory safety bugs in C, and things that have surely led to significant sums of money lost.

> It's also very easy to get this wrong, I almost wrote `hostname[20]=0;` first time round.

Why would you do this separately every single time, then?

The problem with bad APIs is that even the best programmers will occasionally make a mistake, and you should use interfaces (or...languages!) that prevent it from happening in the first place.

The fact we've gotten as far as we have with C does not mean this is a defensible API.

Sure, the post I was replying to made it sound like it's a surprise that anything written in C could ever have been a success.

Not many people starting a new project (commercial or otherwise) are likely to start with C, for very good reason. I'd have to have a very compelling reason to do so, as you say there are plenty of more suitable alternatives. Years ago many of the third party libraries available only had C style ABIs and calling these from other languages was clumsy and convoluted (and would often require implementing cstring style strings in another language).

> Why would you do this separately every single time, then?

It was just an illustration or what people used to do. The "set the trailing NUL byte after a strncpy() call" just became a thing lots of people did and lots of people looked for in code reviews - I've even seen automated checks. It was in a similar bucket to "stuff is allocated, let me make sure it is freed in every code path so there aren't any memory leaks", etc.

Many others would have written their own function like `curlx_strcopy()` in the original article, it's not a novel concept to write your own function to implement a better version of an API.

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