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Comment by mrweasel

1 year ago

> it feels like in recent years there has been a little uptick in people appreciating the level of control C provides, and "going back to basics".

I don't write C, and maybe it's because I somehow seek out these types of article and projects, but I'd agree, I'm seeing the same thing. It might be a backlash against programming languages like Rust or even JavaScript. Rust being really complicated, but clearly safer, and JavaScript... well it's just really hard to set up a development environment and the tooling is almost more predominant than the language itself.

While I don't write C myself, only for fun, I can see many just reverting to it, because it's "right there", it's fast, the language is fairly simple, even if the standard library is anything but simple, but you can take the stuff you need an ignore the rest.

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mrweasel

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tazu  1 year ago

I've personally been very motivated to learn C (coming from Go) by witnessing @jart's[1] progress on Cosmopolitan[2] and Readbean[3]. Writing C is almost like an exercise in sovereignty: ultimate freedom (and danger).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117

  • jerf  1 year ago

    I think it's fine to go back to C and maybe play around a bit to learn about some of the things that can be done, but I would implore you to bear in mind that the decades have taught us that the "ultimate danger" in question is basically that you're building sand castles in a minefield. We're not talking "oh ha ha I guess I wrote a few more bugs that a stronger type system would have caught", we're talking "oh ha ha I guess remote unauthenticated attackers can run arbitrary assembler as root in my network code because I tripped over one of C's nominally well-known mines that I did not personally know about and all the attackers had to do was slightly tweak one of the exploit scripts already in metasploit to install root kits on my system and add it to their bot net".

    The world has gotten a lot more dangerous than people realize. People generally quite correctly assume that hackers aren't going to spend person-months attacking their system personally but don't realize that the attacker tools are quite sophisticated now and they don't have to. Shoving code into a small little buffer overflow to lift to a larger buffer overflow to load exploit code over the network that will run a pre-packaged root priv escalation to install a rootkit to add them to their botnet is no longer the work of a team of hackers for months. It's all off-the-shelf tech now and it's more like writing a 20 line function now; you don't need to attract very much attention now to attract that level of sophistication.

    We are leaving C behind collectively for very good reasons. If you are playing with C and you do not intimately understand those reasons, you're going to relearn them the hard way.

    • jart  1 year ago

      Why do people have this idea that it's the language's job to protect you? C is a small piece of a much larger puzzle. That puzzle includes things like the memory page protection in your CPU's MMU. It includes things like SECCOMP BPF. It also includes things like ASAN, UBSAN, TSAN, etc. If you work in defense it might even include ASICs. The list goes on. Whatever language you believe in probably depends on C. You live in a C world. The value prop of the programming languages other than C/C++ for systems programming is that they build cohesive social communities and C is in the background serving them all. The whole "we're going to save you from the bogeyman" is just kool aid. No one will be saved.

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