And then? In your view, what is a worthy replacement that is just as performant and can be worn just as widely?
You ask the wrong questions. It is not about fast, the focus on performance is precisely the problem.
C is deprecated because secure programming was not a core design issue. At C it is speed for everything and that is a disadvantage in this context because safety is always at the expense of speed.
C certainly has its place, but today raw speed is no longer the most important requirement for most software.
In addition, I would not look for one language that should replace C integrally. We now have numerous languages with their own specializations.
Can you clarify that with a (or a number of) example (s)? Now it is shouting 😉
Any C program can name it that way, it even gives an example: buffer overflows. They are very common in C.
Forward example:
char *test = “test”;
test[1000] = “overflow”;
That crashes, just tested with GCC 9
I find a shortcoming that this code just compiles and crashes immediately.
Or else just the function “scanf”.
However, you come here with a nice point: should the Linux kernel, for example, be rewritten? That is C / C ++ namely.
Yes, that would be interesting. Still, I don’t think it’s a good comparison. An operating system is fundamentally different from an application. An operating system has to be close to the hardware, that’s the whole function. For that reason, Linux also contains pieces of assembly. However, whole pieces of the kernel are not that close to the hardware and would benefit from a safer language.
To be clear: I like working with C. Gladly. But I’m not blind to the shortcomings of programming language designed to solve the problems of 50 kilobytes of memory 50 years ago.
[Reactie gewijzigd door CAPSLOCK2000 op 14 juli 2020 22:48]
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