Comment Re:Wowing developers... (Score 3, Interesting) 784
Non-sissy programmers make mistakes that can let in all sorts of problems with buffer-overruns and other fun vulnerabilities. C is a terrible language for trying to write "secure" or "safe" code.
I'm not saying C is bad for all situations. I just wouldn't use a saw to drive a nail.
By the same token I try not to find problems for my solution.
It may be very simple to do the refernce counting by hand, I'm just saying that it's possible to do a lot of this stuff automatically in a language design. See Limbo. It even has a way to get out of dreaded cycles that cause reference counting to leak memory [a cyclic keyword]. It's a shame Limbo only really works with the Inferno OS.
Also C++ has libraries of things like shared_ptr that do the reference counting in the constructors and destructors of the object. It also can suffer from the cyclic reference leaks of course but the need to double check code or even suspect it of being wrong at the "use" level is greatly diminished.
At the end of the day it's worth noting that no language is perfect, and just knowing the syntax doesn't make you a good coder. It takes practice... and just having a degree in CS isn't gonna make you great.
I'm not saying C is bad for all situations. I just wouldn't use a saw to drive a nail.
By the same token I try not to find problems for my solution.
It may be very simple to do the refernce counting by hand, I'm just saying that it's possible to do a lot of this stuff automatically in a language design. See Limbo. It even has a way to get out of dreaded cycles that cause reference counting to leak memory [a cyclic keyword]. It's a shame Limbo only really works with the Inferno OS.
Also C++ has libraries of things like shared_ptr that do the reference counting in the constructors and destructors of the object. It also can suffer from the cyclic reference leaks of course but the need to double check code or even suspect it of being wrong at the "use" level is greatly diminished.
At the end of the day it's worth noting that no language is perfect, and just knowing the syntax doesn't make you a good coder. It takes practice... and just having a degree in CS isn't gonna make you great.
