Comment by jacquesm
2 years ago
> And what do you propose?
That you get your terminology right, back up your claims with links that actually make sense and try to understand that the software world is complex and that incremental approaches make more sense than demanding unrealistic / uneconomical changes because they are not going to happen.
> To let only 1.5 good C programmers in the world write code like in 70s?
No, I did not propose that, you just did and clearly that's nonsense aka a strawman even if you didn't bother throwing it down.
C is here. It will be here decades from now. Rewriting everything is not going to happen, at least, not in the short term. C will likely still be here (and new C code will likely still be written) in 2100, and possibly long after that. This isn't ideal and it's not going to help that we can not make a clean break with the past even though we are trying.
The solution will come in many small pieces rather than as one silver bullet to cure it all and TFA announces two such small pieces and as such is a small step in a very, very long game. The adoption of Rust and other safer (not inherently safe but safer, there are still plenty of footguns left) may well in the longer run give us a chance to do away with the last of the heritage from the C era. But there is a fair chance that it won't happen and that Rust's rate of adoption will be too low to solve this problem timely.
The same goes for every other managed language, they are partial solutions at best. This isn't good news and it isn't optimal, but it is the reality as far as I can determine. If you're going to do a new greenfield development I hope that you will find yourself on a platform where you won't have to use C and that you have skills and resources at your disposal that will allow you to side-step those problems entirely. But that won't do anything for the untold LOC already out there in production and that utterly dwarfs any concern I have about future development, it's the mess we made in the past that we have to deal with and we have to try hard to avoid making new messes.
Think of it as fixing a large toxic waste spill.
It's not a hypothesis, the change happened several times and is used in networking code: in putty and s2n in C and in grpc in C++ and I guess in all C++ code that uses string_view and span, it's easier to happen in C++ due to more language features.
>Rewriting everything is not going to happen, at least, not in the short term.
If you can't do a big task in one go, split it into smaller tasks and do them in sequence.
I'm sorry, I apparently lack the vocabulary or clarity of expression to get my points across to you so I'm bowing out here.