C Is Best

Every project and programmer shouldn't feel they have to justify their choice not to use Rust (or Zig), who seem to be strangely and disproportionately pushed on Hacker News and specific other social media platforms. This includes the pressure, though a bit less in recent years, to use OOP. If they are getting good results with C and without OOP, and people like the product, then those from outside the project shouldn't really have any say on it. It's their…

I've commented several times before that I consider "C" and "C with analysis backing" to be in practice two different languages. SQLite is the latter: https://sqlite.org/testing.html Writing SQLite in "plain C" without all that would, well, simply not work. I agree that "C with analysis backing" is the best language for SQLite right now. However, it should not be used as an example of "How C is a great language for programming in" unless you are also planning on skillfully…

“None of the safe programming languages existed for the first 10 years of SQLite's existence. SQLite could be recoded in Go or Rust, but doing so would probably introduce far more bugs than would be fixed, and it may also result in slower code.” Modern languages might do more than C to prevent programmers from writing buggy code, but if you already have bug-free code due to massive time, attention, and testing, and the rate of change is low (or…

Less than a year after this was published, Tencent released the Magellan series of sqlite RCEs. I think this is a fine page and it is eminently reasonable that sqlite remains a C codebase. In particular, I think he's right that rewriting sqlite in a memory-safe language would introduce a bunch of bugs and likely result in a couple of years of instability. But the "security" paragraphs in this page do the rest of the argument a disservice. The fact…