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by lanstin 1615 days ago
No? Asking for code nav and you get three answers. Asking for this and you get crickets. In the 90s I worked at a place where we embedded TCL into all the apps, and rolled our own templating systems. I had to do a little string stuff in C after few years of go, and it sucked. Ugg. buf[len] = ‘\0’;

Using go, I thought I was getting back to low level stuff but this C experience made me appreciate strings in Go. Web servers in C are crazy bad idea, especially if they are spitting out html. Lisp would be better. Node would be better. Go would be better.
1 comments
foxfluff 1615 days ago
> buf[len] = ‘\0’;

So why didn't you use one of the bazillion library functions or third party libraries that terminate strings for you?

I feel like most of the criticism is coming from people who punish themselves by rejecting library functions and then telling that strings are hard. Doh.

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lanstin 1615 days ago
I like to see the terminating nul in there, just in case my math was off earlier. I had strdup and so on. I was just way more work than go. And I was writing a LD_PRELOAD that I didn’t want to drag in any extra dependencies other than libc. Trust me, it is faster and safer and more fun in Go than C.
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foxfluff 1615 days ago
Alright, yea, if you're working under constraints like that, C sucks more than it has to.

It just doesn't feel fair to criticize C without mentioning that your experience comes from working under such unusual constraints. "Strings are hard, C sucks" is quite different from "strings are hard, C sucks when you can't rely on libraries." Also feels unfair to say you get crickets when you ask for a lib but actually you weren't even willing to use one. (There are tons of string libraries for C, it's impossible to miss them if you look around.)

Even then, if you're stuck working with only libc and your own code, there's a very high chance you're doing something wrong if you're doing math on strings and terminating them manually. There's a fair selection of libc functions that do all the math for you and will always output a properly terminated string if your inputs are a buffer & valid size and strings.

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