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by pcwalton
3685 days ago
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It's odd to see you saying this, given your security focus. But I suppose implicitly you're referring to UI apps that don't expose remote attack surface. Anyhow, I used to be the same way (perhaps surprisingly given what I work on now), but I stopped once I realized that it just takes so long to do basic things in C compared to other languages. The downside of slow compilation, for example, pales in comparison to the downside of it taking a lot more code to do basic things like string manipulation. I'd also mention that, on Windows, C has big dependencies as well (msvcrt), unless you cheat like MinGW does and use the unsupported system msvcrt. |
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I'm really quite conflicted here. I've written in the past that it can even be seen as irresponsible to write new security-sensitive programs in C/C++ when there are reasonable alternatives available, which is most of the time - and "security-sensitive" can include almost anything, given the right scenario. On the other hand, while I'm a big fan of Rust and use it for some personal projects, some things about it drive me crazy, while C's low-level nature appeals to me, so I also like to use C. I can justify this contradiction to myself easily enough, because I don't write all that much code that other people actually use, but that's something I'd like to change... :( In any case, I'm looking forward to quality-of-life improvements in Rust such as incremental compilation, which should tilt the balance more onto its side.