C’s Biggest Mistake (2009)

Author here. I'll be blunt and repeat a prediction I made 3 years ago or so: C is finished if it doesn't address the buffer overflow problem, and this proposal is a simple, easy, backwards compatible way to do it. It is simply too expensive to deal with buffer overflow bugs anymore. This one addition will revolutionize C programming like adding function prototypes did.

I started coding in the 70s when C first came out. Conflating arrays and pointers was, to me at the time, a huge win. I agree it was a mistake in the long run, but given the state of the art at the time, it gave so much power to the high level programmer that up to that point only assembly level developers had. I was able to move code that up to then had been coded in assembly to…

I've been dismissing these "C is dead" posts for awhile, but now I'm wondering why Nim/Zig/Rust aren't superseding C entirely for new development. It seems like embedded development and FFI libraries are still all C. My theory is that making a language is easy, but giving it good developer ergonomics and ecosystem is hard. Getting a C program to compile is still, in 2021, a pain in the butt. Do you use CMake, Scons, Ninja, Autotools? Do you need to…

I disagree because C is just a more humane assembler, it is unsafe intentionally. Look at all kinds of ugliness of C++ starting from why ZeroMQ can not be written in C++ and ending with [1] both of which were discussed here. I believe the biggest C's mistake is when you say "int x" it means "mut signed int x" while I would like to have "const unsigned int x". [1] http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/iwe/2005-July/000130.h...