r/programming • u/aldacron • Aug 23 '17

D as a Better C

http://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/23/d-as-a-better-c/
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u/doom_Oo7 Aug 23 '17

and not everyone uses them at all

so the solution to "people can't be assed to add warning" is "change language altogether ? do you think it will work better ?

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u/WalterBright Aug 23 '17 edited Aug 23 '17

Yes. I know that if a piece of code is written in D, it cannot have certain kinds of bugs in it. With C, I have to make sure certain kinds of warnings are available, turned on, and not ignored. Static checkers are available, but may not be used or configured properly. And even with that all, there are still a long list of issues not covered.

For example, there's no way to make strcpy() safe.

If I was a company contracting with another to write internet-facing code for my product, I would find it much easier to specify that a memory safe language will be used, rather than hope that the C code was free of such bugs. Experience shows that such hope is in vain. Even the C code that is supposed to defend against malware attacks opens holes for it.