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by flohofwoe 1791 days ago
In the early years the job of the C committee wasn't to improve C, but merely to harmonize existing C implementations, and by the end of the 80's it was already too late, zero-terminated strings had already been baked into operating system APIs (e.g. zero-terminated strings are no longer primarily a language problem, but an ABI problem).

Besides, the x86 "repeat while" string instructions continued the PDP legacy.
2 comments
kortex 1791 days ago
That argument sounds akin to "Well people are used to driving without seatbelts, it'd be painful to make them switch now."

Or like my spouse likes to joke when we get in the car to leave and forgot something in the house: "it's too late, the door's shut."

I get why null terminated strings once existed. It's baffling that they continue to exist 50 years later. Not to mention, they don't even work on data buffers, so you need fat pointers anyways!

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flohofwoe 1791 days ago
Replacing the string memory layout in operating system APIs is more similar to changing the track width on an existing railroad network, across the whole world.

It may be a good idea from a theoretical standpoint, but once you start calculating the cost it simply doesn't make sense.

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kortex 1791 days ago
Obviously not with that attitude. I'm not even talking about back-porting. I'm saying going forward, in new drivers and extensions, and new growth where it makes sense to do so.

There's even plenty of means for backwards-compatible strings and arrays, such as sds.

But really the point was more to "this should have really been addressed decades ago."

https://github.com/antirez/sds

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pjmlp 1791 days ago
Liability and lawsuits due to security exploits will take care of that.

Thankfully they are starting to pick up.

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pjmlp 1791 days ago
We aren't speaking about ANSI/ISO C89 here, rather in what happened the following 32 years.
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flohofwoe 1791 days ago
That doesn't matter, even C doesn't matter in that regard anymore, or the opinion of any other language on the best string memory layout. Once zero-terminated strings leaked into operating system APIs the damage was done forever, and there never was a good time to fix the problem afterwards.
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pjmlp 1791 days ago
That is no excuse not to try to improve the status quo.

Maybe liability and lawsuits are really needed to stop with such excuses.

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