Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kibwen 123 days ago
But this is irrelevant. If you're afraid of third-party code, you can just... choose not to use third-party code? Meanwhile, if I'm afraid of memory corruption in C, I cannot just choose not to have memory corruption; I must instead simply choose not to use C. Meanwhile, Chromium uses tons of third-party Rust code, and has thereby judged the risk differently.
1 comments
JoeAltmaier 123 days ago
Maybe it's more complicated than that? With allocate/delete discipline, C can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C). But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for. By that point of view, we reverse the conclusion.
link
nemothekid 122 days ago
>can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)

We are currently in a thread, where a major application has a heap corruption error in its CSS parser, and it's not even rare for such errors to occur. This doesn't seem true.

>But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for.

Last year there was a backdoor inserted into xz that was only caught because someone thought their CPU usage a little too high. I don't think the whole "C is safer because people don't use dependencies" is actually sound.

link
stackghost 123 days ago
>With allocate/delete discipline, C can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)

The last 40-50 years have conclusively shown us that relying on the programmer to be disciplined, yourself included, does not work.

link
JoeAltmaier 121 days ago
That personal slam was inappropriate. Save it for other pop-culture sites.
link
nagaiaida 123 days ago
yes, people often invoke "simply write safer c" but that doesn't make it any more realistic of a proposition in aggregate as we keep seeing.
link
JoeAltmaier 122 days ago
Yet so many language features that 'help' with this issue, end up not helping. Null pointers are endemic in Java, as well as leaks. Heap fragmentation becomes difficult to address when the language hides it under layers of helpful abstraction.

In the end, discipline of some kind is needed. C is no different.

link