In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:56:11 -0600, "Travis H." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
solinym> Anytime someone wants to rewrite a C library in a language solinym> less prone to buffer overflows, I'm totally for it. Some say solinym> that "it's not the library, it's the programmer", but I think solinym> that denies human factors. C simply requires too much solinym> machinery on top of it to use it securely. [...] solinym> And yet cryptographers continue to write in C. C has three really strong points: - portability. It's one of the most wide-spread and portable compiled languages that I know of. - speed. Most languages with the same level of portability as C that I know of are interpreted. They will probably never get to the level of speed you can get with C. - simple or compatible ABI. C++ could be a good candidate if handled properly (yeah, yeah, I know), but I've yet to see that the ABI used by different compilers on the same platform not differ so much. Most all, I'm thinking of name mangling (uhm, not really sure if that an ABI issue or not :-)). As soon as there's a more secure language that fills those criteria, I see not reason why you'd want to stay with C. In the mean time, we'll probably have to keep on living with its' defficiencies (I do agree with you about those). Cheers, Richard ----- Please consider sponsoring my work on free software. See http://www.free.lp.se/sponsoring.html for details. -- Richard Levitte [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://richard.levitte.org/ "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -- C.S. Lewis --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
