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| Posted by areYouSureAboutThat in reply to Tejas | PermalinkReply |
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areYouSureAboutThat
| On Friday, 6 January 2023 at 11:02:03 UTC, Tejas wrote:
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> Those statements, even if spoken recently, are just a way of maintaining PR. Elon also similarly calls C++ a bloated mess and that all high performance code at Tesla is in C, as if that's something to be proud of... their ultra safety critical software project being built using a very much unsafe-by-defualt-for-everything language...
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> Nvidia made a good decision to use ADA/SPARK, IMO
Well, the worlds most widely used source code revision control system, is written in C ;-)
The C language is not the problem, and I'm unable to accept the assertion in the paper, that 'C was designed to allow unsafe memory operations'. That is a red herring.
In fact, C can be used in a perfectly memory safe manner.
The problem is that too few programmers know how to do that, and even very experienced C programmers can get it wrong sometimes. Both tools and compilers have come along way over the last decade, and it's getting increasingly 'harder' to write memory unsafe C, but in the end, in C, its the programmer that has the control.
That is what the paper should have asserted instead of that red herring.
What the paper is really asserting, is that this control needs to be taken away (at least to some point) from the programmer.
But C will always be the language that gives the programmer the flexibilty and control needed, when all the other languages will not.
Other languages often claim to be 'C like', but that's mostly syntax related.
To be 'C like', the language needs to provide the same flexibility and control as C, and map to the hardware and its instructions set as well as C. In other words, it's going to end up being C anyway.
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