The point is to show that Go is superior to C (which obviously is true but not for the reasons mentioned in the article).
Anything counts.
Go code is obviously formatted with gofmt.
C code is obviously not formatted with "indent -kr".
Liberal use of comma operator unseen in real world.
Look at example of yes(1) with error-handling.
Author doesn't use strdup(3).
But even if he did, it still doesn't make sense to call fprintf(3) once due to allegedly hard error handling.
Error handling is not common path, fprintf(3) doesn't fail!
He concatenates all string into once which makes it O(n^2) because of many many times strlen(3) is called (and kernel copied argv contents before that!).
I bet he did error checking wrong on C side (just checking return value should not be enough). It'd be interesting to see same code on Go side.
Obligatory quote:
"considering that bad code can be written in any language, any language
comparison performed using examples must be judged by the quality of the
examples in each language. it can't be all that hard to write a bad
example in language A and a good example in language B, and then proclaim
language B to be the winner -- this is how people compare languages all the
time, so either those who read them are bad programmers in any language (or
are not programmers at all) and don't know how to reject the bad examples,
or they already agree with the author of the comparison that language B is
better than language A. in either case, it's a waste of anything but
marketing money.
...
#\Erik"