Comment by yjgyhj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yjgyhj | Hacker News Reader

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Haskell has not even close as many libraries, sure. I don't know ZCoin but I have implemented a (simple) Bitcoin wallet. For that you need to have a good crypto library, but otherwise it's not magic. Mining as well.

I think the lesser amount of libraries and lacking the chance of fine-tuning performance (but also your risk of screwing up your performance badly) is a very low price for the provably impossibility to have a mistake like this.

I'm just thinking back on my career, which has been full of bugs of all magnitudes. If I categorise my past bugs, there are many common patterns. Famous old-timers have names, like buffer overflows or memory leaks etc etc. Just not having the possibility to make those errors is such a freeing experience.

Also what's the big problem with no independent standardisation?

Code like this, there were just as many, if not more, logic errors that wouldn't be caught as there were mechanical problems that would have been caught with a more diligent compiler. There's just not the discipline there for good code, period. Too many corners cut, too much code commented out, etc.

I think with the types of errors you mentioned, that part of it definitely is ecosystem. Look at OpenBSD, for example. They've built things like a safer malloc and fairly extensive patches to gcc that have caught a lot of errors and bugs. I think C/C++ can definitely get safer without changing that much, the ecosystem just needs to get a bit angrier about warnings, etc.

Standardization, and multiple implementations, means you can have multiple sets of compiler eyeballs looking over things. The zcoin bug, for example, emits a warning with the default settings of clang, but doesn't emit a peep with the default settings of gcc. For someone working with a lot of embedded code, it also means that there's a better chance that there's an implementation of the language ready to go when you need to move to a different platform.

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