The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

Post by xyzzy123 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 6:20 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #187

xyzzy123 wrote: post #178

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I'm a professional pentester and I have been a C programmer for over well over 5 years, but I acknowledge that my C is probably still pretty bad :) how about you? :) P.S: now I have figured you out (on a very basic level of course) and I have a lot of respect, but nonetheless, let's play :)

I've been writing kernel code in C for about 8 years, including a hardware virtualization subsystem for use on HPCs. I used to teach Network Security and Penetration, but I lost interest in security and moved on to programming language development. My code, in any language, is full of bugs. The difference is that in C my bugs turn into major security vulnerabilities. C is also a terrible language in that you never wr…

Post by xradionut » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 6:20 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #72

Thrymr wrote: post #15

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> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstra…

That's being deliberately obtuse. How many languages are lower level than C, besides assembly? If your ranking has every language in the "high level" camp, then your ranking is poorly calibrated.

Post by anonymouz » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 6:23 PM UTC

luser001 wrote: post #175

abrichr wrote: post #88

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but what can you do... using namespace std; map > foo;

I used to do this. But then I realized I would be importing all symbols from std into my code. Including ones that might get defined in the future (similar to python's 'from foo import *'), which might conflict with some of my own symbols. Hence, I now implicitly import each symbol I need with something like 'using std::map;' (similar to python's 'from foo import bar, bar2'). I've found that the 'using' statement can…

      #define F1 ...,

Post by xyzzy123 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 6:26 PM UTC

betterunix wrote: post #183

xyzzy123 wrote: post #152

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As a C programmer this is like watching virgins attempt to have sex. Normal people just write some code which does some sh*t and that's OK. We don't need to deeply reflect on whether it's cache optimal, because that will change next week. Just good clean C. When did that become a strange thing to do?

"good clean C" Is there such a thing? It seems like every C program, even ones that are praised as being excellently written, are a mess of pointers, memory management, conditional statements that check for errors, special return value codes, and so forth. To put it another way, look at the difference between an implementation of a Red/Black Tree in C and one written in Lisp or Haskell. Not only are basic things over…

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 6:28 PM UTC

popee wrote: post #180

jfb wrote: post #119

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If you don't understand what "virtual machine" means in this context, why are you posting?

Maybe because he uses C and have never heard someone refering to VM and C in same sentence. I'm also interested in this because i also don't get wtf is "C VM". He could be refering to layer below which includes hardware and OS combo. You know, memory pages, translations, ... Is he talking about that? :-)