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by tialaramex 653 days ago
The exercise you suggest is futile. You've assumed that all these C programmers are writing software with a clear meaning and we just need to properly translate it so that the meaning is delivered.

There were C programmers like that, most of them now write Rust. They write what they meant, in Rust it just does what they wrote, they're happy.

But a large number - by now a majority of the die-hard C programmers - don't want that. They want to write nonsense and have it magically work. They don't need a new C dialect or a better compiler, or anything like that, they need fairy tale magic.

1 comments

> There were C programmers like that, most of them now write Rust.

Please don't. There's a space in the world for language flames. But the real world is filled with people trying to evolve existing codebases using tools like ubsan, and that's what I'm talking about.

I don't see how this constitutes a language flame. I spent decades writing C. Twenty years ago I'd have agreed that it was worth trying to "fix" C, today I just write Rust instead.