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by reza_n 2366 days ago
I write C full time and I love it (Varnish Cache). In our team of about 10 full time C engineers, we spend less than an hour a month dealing with things like “memory safety”. When you are writing C at a professional level, your time is spent on things like performance, algorithms, accuracy, hitting requirements, and delivering software. We have numerous safety and fuzzing systems humming in the background checking our work 24/7. The tooling ecosystem (Linux) is top notch.

(If you want to write C full time professionally too, contact me!)
2 comments
kstenerud 2366 days ago
C was my first love, and I still find myself using it often, especially in library code when I want versatility.

I've gotten into the habit of pushing memory allocations as far back into the user program as possible (where the user asks for the size of the internal struct, allocates and casts, and deals with ownership himself) to allow more flexibility to the users of my libraries, and also to remove entire classes of memory issues from the libraries themselves: https://github.com/kstenerud/c-cbe/blob/master/tests/src/rea...

As a bonus, it avoids the headaches of mixing multiple allocators (malloc, new, [NSObject alloc], JNI, etc) when used in cross-language codebases.

It does, unfortunately, complicate the API a little bit, but I find the tradeoff to be worth it in terms of safety.

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helixes 2366 days ago
What does it take to become a professional C engineer? How did you practice all that. I currently started looking into it, but I'm kind of just getting started (Books/PDF, Exercises).
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reza_n 2366 days ago
Time and experience. Learning the syntax and wrapping your head around pointers and memory is the first step. After that, just try and write as much C as possible. Help out with projects, start projects, write tools and APIs. Most importantly, study existing code bases to learn real world techniques. Best case, get a C job where you have to write a diverse amount of C code day after day.
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GeorgeTirebiter 2366 days ago
I can't recommend this book enough: Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective by Diomidis Spinellis. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21006995 for several others.
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