[thrownaway2424]

It's not just that, it also doesn't have automatic destruction of objects, so any local array or structure containing a pointer needs to be laboriously freed by hand.

And in other words, nobody should be writing anything in C. Ever. The need to be compatible with programs written in C violates my rule against writing anything in C and is therefore not a valid reason to write crypto stacks in C.

[pktgen]

> And in other words, nobody should be writing anything in C. Ever.

And in other words, nobody should be listening to thrownaway2424. Ever.

[cesarb]

Pure C does not have automatic destruction of objects, but gcc has an extension to do it. Take a look at systemd's source code to see it in action. It's very similar to C++'s RAII, and can also do things like closing file descriptors.

[deletes]

You realize that most lower things are written in or base on C, right.

[thrownaway2424]

Yes I am fully aware of the sad state of our industry.

[codygman]

I'm curious, what do you propose the industry use?

[pktgen]

Would love to hear the answer to this as well. For the types of thing C is used for, I do not know of another language that can _practically_ be used for the same thing, while maintaining the same level of performance. Rust looks promising but is not mature yet.

[thrownaway2424]

You've never heard of C++?

[72deluxe]

Like BeOS!

[dfkf]

C++11? (runs away...)

[ForHackernews]

Isn't Go designed to fill this niche? It's supposed to be a low-level systems language, but with "friendlier" features than C, and built-in concurrency support.

[codygman]

They kind of recanted that statement and said they meant it for "web servers" and stuff like that. However I know there has been at least a window manager made in Go.

I don't think it's the best fit, but it's a lot better than many current solutions. I personally prefer Haskell for anything others would write in Go, however many may find Ocaml or Erlang to fit them better.

However I'm biased and believe that functional programming is a better fit, more bug-free, easier, and simpler for most use cases than imperative programming.

[pktgen]

Go is advertised as a systems language but certain things like the lack of manual memory management say otherwise.

[wbl]

Before there was C, there was Pascal. You didn't have malloc in Pascal. At ETH Zurich the standard OS was written in Oberon: it ran directly on the hardware with a garbage collector collecting everything.

[thrownaway2424]

Go also has a very highly quality crypto implementation. It has all of the good-code features that gnutls lacks: comments that make sense, unit tests, automatic memory management (of course), useful types, etc.

Compare http://golang.org/src/pkg/crypto/x509/x509.go to https://www.gitorious.org/gnutls/gnutls/source/6aa26f78150cc...

[codygman]

Here is the Haskell version (I think): http://hackage.haskell.org/package/x509-1.4.10/docs/src/Data... http://hackage.haskell.org/package/x509-1.4.10/docs/src/Data...

Other imports/files can be seen at: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/x509-1.4.10/docs/src