alt Hacker News> Yet software developed in C, with all of the foibles of its string routines, has been sold and running for years with trillions of USD is total sales.
Even with the premise that sales of software is a good metric for analyzing design of the language (which I think is arguable at best), we don't know that even more money might have been made with better strings in C. You coming justify pretty much anything with that argument. MongoDB (which indicentally is on C++ and presumably makes plenty of use of std::string) made millions of dollars despite having the bug you mention, so why bother fixing it?
That wasn't really the point I was making.
It was more a response to the OP's comment of:
> I've always wondered at the motivatons of the various string routines in C - every one of them seems to have some huge caveat which makes them useless.
Which, to me, sounded like it was a surprise that anything written in C could be a success at all given that something as basic as the string handling (which is pretty fundamental) is bordering on useless.
As I put in my other comment, there were plenty of reasons way back in the 80s/90s why C was chosen for a lot of software, and hardly any (if any at all) of those reasons remain nowadays.
> MongoDB (which indicentally is on C++ and presumably makes plenty of use of std::string) made millions of dollars despite having the bug you mention, so why bother fixing it?
Again, that's not the point I was making, no-one said anything about not fixing something because of how much money it has made.
All it comes down to is that a lot of very successful software is very shoddily written, in a variety of languages, not just notoriously memory-unsafe languages like C. Well written software, or software written in a "better" language, might have a better chance of "succeeding" (whatever that means), but that doesn't mean that awful software can't succeed.