[asveikau]

Maybe people are voting this down because they think it's directed at Walter Bright in particular, but I think there is actually some truth in the harsh comment.

Nothing about Walter Bright in this statement, but some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.

People who are experts and also critics seem to have a more practical, realistic, nuanced critique, that understands history and challenges to adoption, admits that the long history and difficulty of replacing C isn't exactly for no reason.

[Gibbon1]

That's the way I interpreted it because it's true. A lot of the criticisms are misdirected one by people that haven't used C except being forced to use it for few assignments in school, C++ jockeys that think C is the 30 year out of date version of C that's supported by C++, and people that haven't used it at all for anything real.

I also agree that what the standard committee has been doing for the last 20 years amounts to willful sabotage.

[pjmlp]

So what the improvements between C89 and C18 in regards to UB and security, for any ISO C compliant compiler?

[asveikau]

Between c89 and c18 is close to 30 years.

What about between c99 and c18? Is there anything you can think of? I think the _s() functions, advertised as security features, are a weak effort. Anything else come to mind?

[pjmlp]

Nothing really, if anything VLAs have proven such a mistake that Google lead an effort to remove all instances of VLA use out of the Linux kernel.

Also the amount of UB descriptions just increased and are now well over 200.

Annex K was badly managed, a weak effort as you say, given that pointer and size were still handled separately, and in the end instead of coming up with a better design with struct based handles, like sds, everything was dropped.

ISO C drafts are freely available, I recommend everyone that thinks that they know C out of some book, or have only read K&R book, to actually read them.

[will4274]

> some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.

But were they expert practitioners of C in the past? My experience is that most of the harshest criticisms of C come from former C experts who moved on to other languages because it became clear to them that C would never be fixed - Walter Bright included.

[WalterBright]

I also have extensive (20 years) experience with the solution I proposed.

[asveikau]

Yes I know, and for clarity I appreciate your work and insight, and frequently enjoy your comments here.

My point was that people were mistaking the comment for an attack on you, which I don't think was necessarily intended or needs to be without it being a valid point about a different set of critics.