No.
C is going to be around and useful long after COBOL is collecting dust. Too many core things are built with C. The Linux kernel, the CPython interpreter, etc. Making C go away will require major rewrites of projects that have millions upon millions of hours of development.
Even Fortran has a huge installed base (compared to COBOL) and is still actively used for development. Sometimes the right tool for a job is an old tool, because it is so well refined for a specific task.
Forth anyone?
The rewrite-it-in-rust gang arrives in 3, 2 …
People tend to be obsessed with bleeding edge technology. But those who truly understand know that “bleeding edge” is an anti-pattern and there’s a reason it’s called that: it can bleed you as well.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
That’s the thing, it is broken and there is a fix desperately needed. C lacks memory safety, which is responsible for many, many security vulnerabilities. And they’re entirely avoidable.
So the solution is to take away any agency the developer may have over how their application allocates memory?
Have you heard of the
unsafeblock in rust?
deleted by creator
I do not think C is going to completely go away. If nothing more, it will be used as an ABI, to glue various other languages together.
On the other hand, C is going to fade out, not just for memory safety issues, but also due to “language jank”. Usually language design choices that made sense on 60’s and 70’s mainframes, but no longer needed, and later languages tried to rectify them in their “C-influenced” syntax, but had the issue of also being much higher level than C.
Also Rust is just the most hyped replacement for C, and depending on your usecase, other languages might be much better. D has a very close syntax to C without the jank, expecially when used in the betterC mode.
Serious question: How can a programming language be more or less secure than another? I am just a hobbiest, not a professional, so I am genuinely curious.
My dad who is a software engineer can’t even answer my question. But then he’s old and I’ve only seen this argument coming from the young bloods.
Concrete technical answer (one of many): imagine you have a list (“array”) of 5 numbers, and you try to print the 10th number in the array. A secure language will say “error! it’s a list of 5 numbers, there is no 10th one!!”. C will instead print some random garbage (whatever happens to be in the part of memory following the 5 element list), or maybe do something even crazier (try searching “nasal demon”), without indicating that anything has gone wrong. There are many other issues like this with C. You end up with programs going completely into the weeds, turning control over to attackers, etc.
Abstract philosophical answer: Secure languages like Ada and (hopefully) Rust are designed to help you ensure the absence of unwanted behaviours, rather than just the presence of wanted ones. If you want behaviour X, the goal of old languages like C was to make sure you could write a program in which X was present. That was a big enough challenge in the old days that language designers stopped once they reached that point. If you don’t want behaviour Y (let’s say Y is a security attack), it’s up to you to just write the program without behaviour Y. 50+ years of experience have shown that to be inhumanly difficult once the program gets complicated, so you really do need help from the language. Accountants invented double-entry bookkeeping 700 years ago for similar sorts of reasons: to keep small errors in complicated systems from sending the system into a nose dive.
Ensuring the absence of behaviours is the classic problem of proving a negative, so there are limits on how thorough the checking can be, and the technical features (like the notorious Rust borrow checker) can be difficult to use. But if you’re willing to endure a certain amount of pain and runtime inefficiency (requiring the program to do a little extra work at each operation to make sure the result makes sense, like the example of the 10th element of the 5-element list), you can make programs much safer than you can in C.
Does that help?
Added: Rust is getting some flak because it is pretty new, is still a work in progress, has various unmet goals, etc. It’s not fully baked yet but it is getting there (I’m studying it right now). Ada is an older language that is way more mature than Rust, but is more of a pain to use in many ways, so Rust is currently getting more attention.
These tech images are getting pretty ridiculous. What even is this thumbnail?
Only ones who knows how to make proper tech images are the folks at O’Reily publisbing
It’s how everyone who’s anyone does code reviews!
