On Saturday, 6 May 2017 at 06:26:29 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Walter: I believe memory safety will kill C.
Hi,
I think that comparing languages like D to C is not appropriate.
C is a high level assembler and has different design goals. A
useful document to refer to is:
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1250.pdf
In particular: (although note the addition of facet f, which
echoes the sentiment that security is important)
Keep the spirit of C. The Committee kept as a major goal to
preserve the traditional
spirit of C. There are many facets of the spirit of C, but the
essence is a community
sentiment of the underlying principles upon which the C language
is based. For the Cx1
revision there is consensus to add a new facet f to the original
list of facets. The new
spirit of C can be summarized in phrases like:
(a) Trust the programmer.
(b) Don't prevent the programmer from doing what needs to be done.
(c) Keep the language small and simple.
(d) Provide only one way to do an operation.
(e) Make it fast, even if it is not guaranteed to be portable.
(f) Make support for safety and security demonstrable.
Proverb e needs a little explanation. The potential for efficient
code generation is one of the most important strengths of C. To
help ensure that no code explosion occurs for what appears to be
a very simple operation, many operations are defined to be how
the target machine's hardware does it rather than by a general
abstract rule. An example of this willingness to live with what
the machine does can be seen in the rules that govern the
widening of char objects for use in expressions: whether the
values of char objects widen to signed or unsigned quantities
typically depends on which byte operation is more
efficient on the target machine.
I think Linus Torvalds makes an important observation - he says
in one of his talks is that the reason he likes C is that when he
write C code he can visualize what the machine code will look
like.
My feeling is that the C has traditionally been used in contexts
where probably it should not be used - i.e. as a general purpose
application development language. But I don't see how languages
like D or Rust can replace C for certain types of use cases.
Regards
Dibyendu
