Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
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Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#2There are many, many more such issues with that code. The person that posted it is new to C and had an AI help them to write the code. That's a recipe for disaster, it means the OP does not actually understand what they wrote. It looks nice but it is full of footguns and even though it is a useful learning exercise it also is a great example of why it is better run battle tested frame works than to inexpertly roll your own.
As a learning exercise it is useful, but it should never see production use. What is interesting is that the apparent cleanliness of the code (it reads very well) is obscuring the fact that the quality is actually quite low.
If anything I think the conclusion should be that AI+novice does not create anything that is useable without expert review and that that probably adds up to a net negative other than that the novice will (hopefully) learn something. It would be great if someone could put in the time to do a full review of the code, I have just read through it casually and already picked up a couple of problems, I'm pretty sure that if you did a thorough job of it there would be many more.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#3I can't completely blame the language here: anyone "coding" in a language new to them using an LLM is going to have real problems.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#4There are many, many more such issues with that code. The person that posted it is new to C and had an AI help them to write the code. That's a recipe for disaster, it means the OP does not actually understand what they wrote. It looks nice but it is full of footguns and even though it is a useful learning exercise it also is a great example of why it is better run battle tested frame works than to inexpertly roll yo…
> What is interesting is that the apparent cleanliness of the code (it reads very well) is obscuring the fact that the quality is actually quite low.
I think this is a general feature and one of the greatest advantages of C. It's simple, and it reads well. Modern C++ and Rust are just horrible to look at.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#5> Another interesting choice in this project is to make lengths signed:
There are good reasons for this choice in C (and C++) due to broken integer promotion and casting rules.
See: "Subscripts and sizes should be signed" (Bjarne Stroustrup) https://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p1428r0...
As a nice bonus, it means that ubsan traps on overflow (unsigned overflows just wrap).
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#6There are many, many more such issues with that code. The person that posted it is new to C and had an AI help them to write the code. That's a recipe for disaster, it means the OP does not actually understand what they wrote. It looks nice but it is full of footguns and even though it is a useful learning exercise it also is a great example of why it is better run battle tested frame works than to inexpertly roll yo…
> What is interesting is that the apparent cleanliness of the code (it reads very well) is obscuring the fact that the quality is actually quite low. I think this is a general feature and one of the greatest advantages of C. It's simple, and it reads well. Modern C++ and Rust are just horrible to look at.
I slightly unironically believe that one of the biggest hindrances to rust's growth is that it adopted the :: syntax from C++ rather than just using a single . for namespacing.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#7There are many, many more such issues with that code. The person that posted it is new to C and had an AI help them to write the code. That's a recipe for disaster, it means the OP does not actually understand what they wrote. It looks nice but it is full of footguns and even though it is a useful learning exercise it also is a great example of why it is better run battle tested frame works than to inexpertly roll yo…
I agree that it reads really well which is why I was also surprised the quality is not high when I looked deeper. The author claims to have only used AI for the json code, so your conclusion may be off, it could just be a novice doing novice things.
I suppose I was just surprised to find this code promoted in my feed when it's not up to snuff. And I'm not hating, I do in fact love the project idea.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#8> Another interesting choice in this project is to make lengths signed: There are good reasons for this choice in C (and C++) due to broken integer promotion and casting rules. See: "Subscripts and sizes should be signed" (Bjarne Stroustrup) https://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p1428r0... As a nice bonus, it means that ubsan traps on overflow (unsigned overflows just wrap).
I do not agree that the integer promotion or casting (?) rules are broken in C. That some people make mistakes because they do not know them is a different problem.
The reason you should make length signed is that you can use the sanitizer to find or mitigate overflow as you correctly observe, while unsigned wraparound leads to bugs which are basically impossible to find. But this has nothing to do with integer promotion and wraparound bugs can also create bugs in - say - Rust.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#9There are many, many more such issues with that code. The person that posted it is new to C and had an AI help them to write the code. That's a recipe for disaster, it means the OP does not actually understand what they wrote. It looks nice but it is full of footguns and even though it is a useful learning exercise it also is a great example of why it is better run battle tested frame works than to inexpertly roll yo…
Yeah, I recently wrote a moderate amount of C code [1] entirely with Gemini and while it was much better than what I initially expected I needed a constant steering to avoid inefficient or less safe code. It needed an extensive fuzzing to get the minimal amount of confidence, which caught at least two serious problems---seriously, it's much better than most C programmers, but still.
Re: Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is interesting is that the apparent cleanliness of the code (it reads very well) is obscuring the fact that the quality is actually quite low. I think this is a general feature and one of the greatest advantages of C. It's simple, and it reads well. Modern C++ and Rust are just horrible to look at.
I slightly unironically believe that one of the biggest hindrances to rust's growth is that it adopted the :: syntax from C++ rather than just using a single . for namespacing.
I believe that the fanatics in the rust community were the biggest factor. They turned me off what eventually became a decent language. There are some language particulars that were strange choices, but I get that if you want to start over you will try to get it all right this time around. But where the Go authors tried to make the step easy and kept their ego out of it, it feels as if the rust people aimed at creating a new temple rather than to just make a new tool. This created a massive chicken-and-the-egg problem that did not help adoption at all. Oh, and toolchain speed. For non-trivial projects for the longest time the rust toolchain was terribly slow.
I don't remember any other language's proponents actively attacking the users of other programming language.