[ibains]

This post is good for learning, we have too many “systems“ developed in Java (Hadoop et al - I’m looking at you - you sluggish bugs in the rug), we need more programmers to learn C and build systems in it.

Also, you can do this so much easier in scala using parser combinators, if the goal is time to market and the code to be compiled is not very large. Here is an example to see how the approaches compare: https://www.prophecy.io/blogs/scala-packrat-parser-combinato...

[macintux]

> …we need more programmers to learn C and build systems in it.

I agree with the first, but not the second. C is a valuable language to know, but for security’s sake we need fewer complex programs in it, not more.

[adrian_b]

While C may be criticized for making it too easy to misuse pointers, for other features that are usually mentioned as security problems for C programs, e.g. out-of-bounds addressing and numeric overflow, the culprit is not the C language, but the manufacturers of the most popular CPUs, e.g. the Intel/AMD CPUs.

On most modern CPUs, checking for addressing bounds or for overflow is too expensive and the software developers almost always choose speed over correctness.

There have been a few C compilers with optional run-time checks for bounds and overflow, but almost nobody used those options for production code.

Unlike the Intel/AMD ISA, there are other instruction sets which include a variety of exception conditions, for a cheap implementation of the run-time checks (e.g. the IBM POWER ISA), but even there I do not know if the most recent implementations of those architectures have efficient exceptions.

[userbinator]

"security"? You mean the paranoia FUD of Big Tech justifying their enslavement of users and locking them out of their own bought general-purpose-computers --- I mean devices --- to further the authoritarian corporatocracy?

"Trusted" computing, DRM, and all its ugly ilk are premised on making things "secure". Maybe its time we opened our eyes to realise that uncomfortable truth. If the government and the megacorps are scared enough by encryption to want backdoors into our lives, maybe we should want ones into them too.

"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

[d110af5ccf]

The comment you replied to had absolutely nothing to do with encryption or DRM.

C being low level means you're forced to do many tedious and complicated things manually. This makes the code you write prone to errors which (in the worst case) can be exploited by attackers to run arbitrary code on your system.

... but I'm sure you're already well aware of this which leaves me wondering why you wrote what you did.