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Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

I once wrote a website (a search engine for a specific set of websites) in C. It actually worked, once I spend 20 hours in valgrind. I've grown since then, in two important ways. First, I'd probably do a better job now, and not have to spend any time in valgrind at all (I still use C quite frequently). Second, I'd never, ever, try to pull that stunt again.

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> It actually worked, once I spend 20 hours in valgrind

Thia is exactly the main problem with C.

You need to rely on tolling outside the language to be able to write safer code.

While languages like Ada and Modula-2 and their descendents, offer the same hardware capabilities as C with stronger type checking.

We use C# which allows you to write safe code. However, people still manage to fuck it up at an implementation level often enough for it to cause high risk problems.

I do mostly JVM and .NET based development nowadays, in consulting projects.

Sometimes I wish to be part of a C or C++ based project, then I try to imagine how the quality of our offshore guys would map to those languages and realize how lucky I am not to be part of such projects.

Don't you do something wrong, when you consult the company to use (more) offshore guys? I thought that a company is best led, when developers share their knowledge cooperatively and ask their managers to outsource unimportant time-consuming things like api-/file-/conversions, legacy code support, CSVs …

(Disclaimer: Don't get my tone wrong please, I'm asking not suggesting, thus I respect your experience.)

Most consulting projects in Fortune 500 companies end up with outsourcing the whole project department to the consulting company, in the cases where IT is not the main business.

Oh, I didn't know that it's so extreme.. thanks for reporting back, I appreciate it :)

That's what is supposed to happen but the MBA asshats use it purely for cost cutting...

Yeah very good point. Our offshore guys can't even get c# right :)

If you have not already and can do so, I highly recommend adding Dtrace to your C development toolkit. Dtrace, Valgrind, and GDB make rooting out C runtime issues a lot more pleasant and complement one another well.

Indeed. It's a pity DTrace is not available in Linux (there are two ports, none work for real work). It's also a pity DTrace in OS X is starting to bit rot.

A clean room reimplementation of Dtrace is on my list of ideal computing wants that will probably never happen.

Also on the list is everyone targeting the same hypervisor for device drivers (such as Xen) so that hardware support is excellent for all operating systems and all devices.

I would really, really like a clean room reimplementation of Hexray's IDA pro so that I can use it on OS and architecture, an LLVM front end for Plan 9/Inferno OS, a clean room reimplementation of ZFS, GNUstep to have at least a 1:1 implementation of Cocoa so that no matter the OS and architecture one can target that GUI kit and we have inter-application reuse of functionality through scripts like we have for CLI apps, and a clean room reimplementation of AutoCAD and Candence's Orcad.

And as someone who uses a CAS or equivalent environment a lot, I would really appreciate if an ecosytem such as julia, ipython, or octave would reach and exceed Mathematica and Matlab in ease of use, degree of combination and semantics possibilities, and power as well as efficacy.

I really would like to be able to use Plan 9/Inferno OS all the time but developer tools are not comparable to any BSD or Linux ecosystem and there is not a good GUI toolkit available (I would like GNUstep here is why I want the implementation to succeed).

People who can reverse engineer software and hardware is a very small population compared to the res of the dev population though and they are very likely to end up in a lawsuit if they try.

I don't know where the problem is, I use http://gpo.zugaina.org/dev-util/dtrace on Gentoo without a problem.

We actually used c in ~2000 in our web company (one of the biggest in our country at that time). Even the finnish EU commission site ran on C platform that I wrote. Oh the days..

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