this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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White House urges developers to dump C and C++::Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

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[–] CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If you're an expert tightrope walker, you're likely not gonna fall off. You can just do it without too much issue. When you're doing it over a chasm, and you don't plan on dying, you'd still probably prefer a harness though, wouldn't you?

Edit: I'm not saying C is a bad language or anything, but for important applications the safety of actually memory safe languages is vital for lower-skilled programmers and still a good assistance for higher-skilled programmers, as we're all humans and it doesn't hurt to try and avoid the mistakes we will eventually make.

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I'll say it. C is a bad language. There was a time when it needed needed to exist and using it was a smart choice, but it has outlived its usefulness for anything but legacy code and niche use cases like FFI. It's in essentially the same category as Cobol.

[–] mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

The bad language that all successor languages copied?

Edit: spell.

[–] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Did you mean predecessor, like the languages that came before it?

[–] mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 8 months ago

Fuck I meant successor

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It wasn't bad at the time relative to what else was around.

And I don't even know what you're getting at by saying "all" successor languages copied it. Are you referring to how many languages use curly braces as block delimiters? Because that's not what's wrong with C.