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Comment by jcul | Hacker News Reader

It made me laugh to think of C implementers being adversarial! It can feel that way.

I haven't really used modern C, not sure if it's evolved as much as modern C++, which I feel is a joy to use, and a lot safer. But then I've been writing C++ for decades.

I feel like C evolved from basically syntax sugar for assembly, so that's where all the footguns come from, rather than being actually adversarial.

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If some of the things that the C standard left undefined had instead been made implementation defined then the compiler would at least be obligated to do something that makes sense on the target architecture, rather than having license to take the lawful-evil route. (Plenty of architectures have addressable RAM at location zero, for instance.)

For some reason this always brings to mind that moment in Red Dwarf where Kryten, devoid of his behavioural chip, deems it appropriate to serve roast human to his crewmates. "If you eat chicken, obviously you'd eat your own species as well, otherwise you'd just be picking on the chickens!"

Both C and C++ compilers (in fact, they share this part) very aggressively exploited undefined behavior for performance. But I this was certainly not adversarial. Programmers also regularity picked optimizations over safety. I think nowadays the unsafety of C with modern tooling vs the safety of - say - Rust is very much exaggerated.

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