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How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

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Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#21

Post by lifthrasiir »

lelanthran wrote: post #7

I think every graduating student should work on a non-trivial application in plain C for a year before moving on to another language. It makes you exceptionally paranoid about failure states and practically requires a bit of thought and planning before attempting any non-trivial change. The mindset of "it's fine to ignore all error conditions and let the default exception handler print a stack trace to the user" resu…

While I agree with last two paragraphs, C is not good even for that purpose because it doesn't give any tool to manage them. An effective C education should really be paired with various static analyses and formal verification strategies.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#22

Post by bdw5204 »

topspin wrote: post #18
mgaunard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the white house said and they're not an authority in software engineering anyway. Just sensationalist journalism.

This is what the White House said: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Final-... Interpreting this as "stop using C/C++" isn't much of a stretch. Yes, it is not a demand. Anticipating such a demand isn't a bad bet, however. Who is an authority, anyhow? The White House is citing NIST, DHS, Microsoft, Cambridge DSCT, Google and others. Whom do you offer? I don't like this myself. We're rapidly buildin…

At most, the White House's opinion on C/C++ will impact government contractors and people who care about the White House's opinion on matters it isn't qualified to speak about.

I'd only be worried if I were in the business of selling software written in C/C++ to the government but a few campaign donations to politicians would probably get that fixed.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#23

Post by wiseowise »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #6

1) were C programmers "better"? In sum total, pretty much. 2) C programs, at least the ones we use now, are a product of a lot of use and debugging 3) It didn't take too many debugging sessions as a C programmer to learn to program a bit more carefully. 4) and the more it gets used, the more error codes it encounters, and the more robust the handling gets. I think a dirty secret of software engineering isn't that the…

> were C programmers "better"? In sum total, pretty much

No. Original programmers that just happened to use C were better, not the other way around.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#24

Post by mbivert »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #21
lelanthran wrote: post #7

I think every graduating student should work on a non-trivial application in plain C for a year before moving on to another language. It makes you exceptionally paranoid about failure states and practically requires a bit of thought and planning before attempting any non-trivial change. The mindset of "it's fine to ignore all error conditions and let the default exception handler print a stack trace to the user" resu…

While I agree with last two paragraphs, C is not good even for that purpose because it doesn't give any tool to manage them. An effective C education should really be paired with various static analyses and formal verification strategies.

Well, there are such tools for C, but wouldn't using them be detrimental in this context? Think, like using a debugger vs. trying to wrap the execution in one's mind: I'not saying that one shouldn't use debuggers, but not using one has benefits, as a teaching device.

Like running in a weight vest.

Edit: ah, perhaps you meant, in addition to using raw C, one should also learn how to use such static analyzers & cie

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#25

Post by yetihehe »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #21
lelanthran wrote: post #7

I think every graduating student should work on a non-trivial application in plain C for a year before moving on to another language. It makes you exceptionally paranoid about failure states and practically requires a bit of thought and planning before attempting any non-trivial change. The mindset of "it's fine to ignore all error conditions and let the default exception handler print a stack trace to the user" resu…

While I agree with last two paragraphs, C is not good even for that purpose because it doesn't give any tool to manage them. An effective C education should really be paired with various static analyses and formal verification strategies.

> While I agree with last two paragraphs, C is not good even for that purpose because it doesn't give any tool to manage them.

That is the reason it should be used as a learning tool. So that you know the nitty gritty details without anyone "managing" it away from you.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#26

Post by Gigachad »

lelanthran wrote: post #7

I think every graduating student should work on a non-trivial application in plain C for a year before moving on to another language. It makes you exceptionally paranoid about failure states and practically requires a bit of thought and planning before attempting any non-trivial change. The mindset of "it's fine to ignore all error conditions and let the default exception handler print a stack trace to the user" resu…

Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#27

Post by lelanthran »

Gigachad wrote: post #26
lelanthran wrote: post #7

I think every graduating student should work on a non-trivial application in plain C for a year before moving on to another language. It makes you exceptionally paranoid about failure states and practically requires a bit of thought and planning before attempting any non-trivial change. The mindset of "it's fine to ignore all error conditions and let the default exception handler print a stack trace to the user" resu…

Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

> Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

How is that better for developing a sense of paranoia around error states?

"Throw it at the wall and see what sticks" does not exactly lead to "extreme paranoia managing errors".

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#28

Post by Jensson »

Gigachad wrote: post #26
lelanthran wrote: post #7

I think every graduating student should work on a non-trivial application in plain C for a year before moving on to another language. It makes you exceptionally paranoid about failure states and practically requires a bit of thought and planning before attempting any non-trivial change. The mindset of "it's fine to ignore all error conditions and let the default exception handler print a stack trace to the user" resu…

Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

Back when every developer had to build their own failure detection code and display messages to help themselves debug anything that meant that almost every developer was good at communicating errors to the user.

Today developers don't build that skill, so you see applications that just fails silently everywhere or produce nonsense errors. The better developer tools you have the less your developers will need to learn UX skills to be able to do their work.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#29

Post by GuestHNUser »

theyinwhy wrote: post #20
whiterknight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C is horrible for exploratory programming Completely disagree. The lack of screwing around selecting abstractions forces you to make something productive right away and not stress about refactor.

Isn't "forced to make sth productive right away" the opposite of "exploratory programming"?

No, I think exploratory programming is exactly that. Solutions to a problem is the very thing to be explored.

Re: How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

#30

Post by BazookaMusic »

lelanthran wrote: post #27
Gigachad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

> Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states. How is that better for developing a sense of paranoia around error states? "Throw it at the wall and see what sticks" does not exactly lead to "extreme paranoia managing errors".

It helps because the instinct is to write lazy code that may fail and the rust compiler will annoy you until it compiles. Every annoyance to fix is a thing you usually need to think about in other languages.

For example, if I'm coding in C# it's easier for me to understand the impact of passing our resources that need to be disposed and good patterns to handle that after Rust has made me lose hairs on this concept.

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