[foxfluff]

> 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.

[lanstin]

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.

[foxfluff]

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.