alt Hacker NewsI suspect that there is a body of C programmers out here that use C on a regular basis that aren’t posting who know that using C safely is 99% just using Valgrind and some specific GCC or llvm flags and you’re done.
They don’t reply to these threads to share that knowledge because these threads devolve into cesspools about how you should just use Rust despite the language not meeting specific requirements authors have that you have to do additional work and maintenance for in “safe” languages that you get for free in C because you don’t have to emulate it.
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> I suspect that there is a body of C programmers out here that use C on a regular basis that aren’t posting who know that using C safely is 99% just using Valgrind and some specific GCC or llvm flags and you’re done.
C* (the submitted language) is not just about determining memory correctness and related program features like what Valgrind will do for you (or help with). It's about proving correctness of programs more generally, so any C programmer not looking at it because they know about Valgrind are choosing to skip something interesting for a very poor reason.
> I suspect that there is a body of C programmers out here that use C on a regular basis that aren’t posting who know that using C safely is 99% just using Valgrind and some specific GCC or llvm flags and you’re done.
Absolutely right! I sincerely hope they share their knowledge here and elsewhere.
> They don’t reply to these threads to share that knowledge because these threads devolve into cesspools
HN is often rage-inducing when it comes to comments on C/C++/Fortran/Cobol/etc. older languages and systems. There are many critical and industrial-strength systems developed by the previous generation of engineers/programmers which today's noobs/cargo-cultists cannot even hope to imagine much less understand.
As an example, people talk about all the great features provided by Erlang but forget that its BEAM VM where most of the "magic" resides is actually written in C! Imagine how much expertise lies buried in its implementation!
Other languages are much farther along than this. You can in theory take a pile of Rust and isolate exactly the points where undefined behavior might occur, or eliminate them entirely in Ada/Spark.