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Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> so the article being an account of the guy's journey using C seems highly appropriate.

More importantly, it goes against the cargo cult narrative that the choice of programming language is the one and only factor determining memory safety, and consequently any use of languages such as C automatically leads to security issues.

It's not a coincidence that we have people in this discussion coping with that concept by spinning the use of frameworks focused on memory safety in C applications as somehow representing writing code in an entirely different programming language.

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Even the author mentions that he intends to rewrite everything he ever writes in some memory safe language he's building.

Despite the authors borderline obsessive efforts to write memory safe C code, it's interesting to note that his implementation of "bc" prominently contains a file documenting memory issues in previous versions. If that's what borderline obsessive gets you, how are us normies who are only programming to pay the bills, who have to work with other people who also just want to finish what they are doing or interact with blobs of code written by other people with less exacting standards supposed to write memory safe code?

> Even the author mentions that he intends to rewrite everything he ever writes in some memory safe language he's building.

It's a framework. It's a set of C macros and C code. It's not a new language. Please stop.

If you are going to be snarky you should probably read all the way to the bottom of the article.

> The final reason is the only one that justifies my decision: my code will be rewritten in a memory-safe language.

> No, it won’t be Rust. It’s my own language. It’s called Yao.

Yup, that's what I thought was the most interesting part of this, how many memory errors this guy has already admitted to releasing into production in this one project despite all his precautions.

If you wanna write your hobby programs in C because you think it's fun, then fine, you do you. But this seems like a pretty good indication that basically no C written by anyone can realistically be truly safe.

That was my favorite part - it was incredibly virtuous behavior to lay it all out like that. The article would not have been interesting if it had omitted those details.

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