[_sh]

It's not so much a question of benchmarks, it's that one of the standard C tools for reading an arbitrary string from standard input is gets(). And if you reach for that from the standard toolbox, you've failed before you've started.

[caf]

gets() isn't part of the C standard anymore (it was entirely removed in C11, and prior to that was marked "obsolescent and deprecated" 18 years ago in C99).

[lacampbell]

Many rust advocates talk about the performance cost of doing things safely in C, and inform me that rust has "Zero-cost abstractions". So it's fairly natural I ask for something I can benchmark.

[caconym_]

> Many rust advocates talk about the performance cost of doing things safely in C

Who's saying this? It doesn't really make sense, taken out of context as it is here.

> inform me that rust has "Zero-cost abstractions"

IMO at best the array bounds checking thing is an extremely poor example of a "zero-cost abstraction"; at worst it's not an example of it at all. As I understand it, the term refers to things like static dispatch on closures and trait methods, iterator fusion, and generally any place where the compiler can transform high level abstractions into really efficient low-level code where in other languages/implementations you might incur a performance penalty, for instance by dynamic dispatch to heap-allocated closures, or allocation of an intermediate vector at every "link" in an iterator method chain.

[tjr]

Having used C (on and off) for about twenty years, including writing aerospace software in C, I strongly agree that writing safe C is possible.

Rust (which I have thus far only tinkered with) looks pretty appealing to me, though. Do you suggest using C instead of Rust? If so, why?

[dreta]

If Rust solves the kinds of problems you have, then by all means use it. I don't think there exists a language that's in all aspects better than any other. For me personally, C is the language that gets in my way the least without forcing me to write ASM, and that happens to be highest on my list. If there was a language with the same idea of minimalism behind it as C, but with all the quirks and bad syntax choices out, i'd switch in a heartbeat.

[lacampbell]

Rust (which I have thus far only tinkered with) looks pretty appealing to me, though. Do you suggest using C instead of Rust? If so, why?

I'd probably suggest a higher level language if you can get away with it (portability, performance, etc), but I am not really advocating for using one language over another here.. What I am advocating is writing a thin layer of abstraction to avoid buffer overflows in the already extant code base. I suspect it would be a better choice in terms of cost/benefit than re-writing the code.