Time safety is more important than memory safety
halestrom.net
Time safety is more important than memory safety
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#2I thought this was going to be about concurrency, but it's instead about the risk that programming languages will become obsolete quickly.
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#3The knowledge needed to compile a C program into executable code will never die, as long as there is a human race.
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#4I think this is yet another post that falls into the trap of mistaking HN/Reddit -- fashion publications, really -- for something else. They're GQ or Vogue, not the New York Times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106559
The vast majority of developers do and always will choose well-established languages. If Go or Rust or Zig or Kotlin or Clojure or Elixir ever become truly popular, by that time they will have become established and "safe" (unless they were Microsoft technologies, but they're not).
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#5New programming languages should address this concern. C by itself doesn't, really.
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#6The knowledge needed to compile a C program into executable code will never die, as long as there is a human race.
C is only about 50 years old. I'd say it remains to be seen (not in our lifetime).
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#7I don't get the argument. Is the author complaining about complexity of languages like Rust? I.e. only simple languages supposedly have longevity? C++ is complex, yet it already exists for quite a long time too.
Just because C happens to be a long used language doesn't mean you shouldn't be using newer and better languages and that those languages can't be used for a long time too.
C is used not due to big benefits, but mostly for legacy reasons today. Basically a lot of projects are already stuck with it. But for new ones, surely use Rust, not C.
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#8The knowledge needed to compile a C program into executable code will never die, as long as there is a human race.
Lots of C code have already bitrotted because APIs it depends on have been abandoned. Resurrecting it isn't just a matter of compiling the code, but recreating the environment it ran in.
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#9I think this is yet another post that falls into the trap of mistaking HN/Reddit -- fashion publications, really -- for something else. They're GQ or Vogue, not the New York Times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106559 The vast majority of developers do and always will choose well-established languages. If Go or Rust or Zig or Kotlin or Clojure or Elixir ever become truly popular, by that time they will have…
Of course, new developers will want to program in Kotlin. Just as per the post, they're not entirely sure of any reasonable why's. They're pretty adamant they don't want to spend their next 40 years ending up as the elder peers tending the same codebase though. :>
Re: Time safety is more important than memory safety
#10The knowledge needed to compile a C program into executable code will never die, as long as there is a human race.
Lots of C code have already bitrotted because APIs it depends on have been abandoned. Resurrecting it isn't just a matter of compiling the code, but recreating the environment it ran in.
That was before storage become abundant and cheap; from a source code storage perspective. It will not become more expensive.
Nowadays storage capacity is developed to store video - this is really the only thing that needs a lot of new storage capacity.
Every line of sourcecode written by every programmer ever is a fart in the wind compared to what's being uploaded to Youtube in the next 60 seconds.