The C programming language is terrible. I mean, magnificent, too. Much of the world in which we live was built atop C. It is foundational to almost all..<\/b>
\nThe C programming language is terrible. I mean, magnificent, too. Much of the world in which we live was built atop C. It is foundational to almost all computer programming, both historically and practically; there\u2019s a reason that the curriculum for Xavier Niel\u2019s revolutionary \u201c42\u201d schools begins with students learning how to rewrite standard C library functions from scratch. But C is no longer suitable for this world which C has built.
I mean \u201cterrible\u201d in the \u201cawe-inspiring dread\u201d sense more than the \u201cbad\u201d sense. C has become a monster. It gives its users far too much artillery with which to shoot their feet off. Copious experience has taught us all, the hard way, that it is very difficult, verging on \u201cbasically impossible, \u201d to write extensive amounts of C code that is not riddled with security holes. As I wrote two years ago, in my first Death To C piece:
If you\u2019 re a developer you already know where I\u2019 m going, of course: to tout the virtues of Rust, which is, in fact, a viable C\/C++ replacement. Two years ago I suggested that people start writing new low-level coding projects in Rust instead of C. The first rule of holes, after all, is to stop digging.
Today I am seriously suggesting that when engineers refactor existing C code, especially parsers and other input handlers, they replace it \u2014 slowly, bit by bit \u2014 with Rust. Per this excellent Geoffroy Couprie post:
Rust is no a panacea, of course, There are many other valuable approaches to improving software stability and security. (Formal verification, for instance, or the Langsec movement.) But it is a plausible and valuable iterative approach, and we are only going to dig ourselves out of our giant collective security hole iteratively, one shovelful of better code and better tooling at a time. The sooner we start digging, the sooner C will slowly oxidize away.<\/p>\n

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Sentiment rank: -1.1<\/div>\n

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