Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrVandemar | Hacker News Reader

Because 'C', as fantastic as the language is, is prone to users making errors, and errors cost (sometimes incredible amounts of) money, and even peoples lives. See the Great 1990 Telephone Crash for the former.

I like 'C', but I'd never get in an aircraft where a 'C' compiler was used for anything other than the in-flight entertainment system.

View on HN

There's a lot of C code in avionics op systems, both new and old.

There are multiple static analysis frameworks for verifying C code in aviation; Frama-C and Astrée just to name two.

https://frama-c.com/html/overview.html

https://www.astree.ens.fr/

If you've ever got in an aircraft it's too late, you've almost certainly been in one using C for flight control functions.

I've worked in automotive where literally everything except the infotainment systems are in C.

Almost all, if not all, firmware is in C.

Also, not to mention every operating system.

I really don't know where the "bugs are horrible" argument grounds itself on. I've worked on large C, rust, go, python and even Haskell codebases. Everyone of them had their share of super corner case bugs.

The systems which use the simplest concepts and tools tend to have the least bugs cause they are more readable and hence fixable.

With high integrity code quality certifications like MISRA-C, a quality level that most folks with cry if forced to work daily under such restrictions.

And since most companies keep failing at achieving the quality that random C coders say it is so easy on the Internets, provided one is a good C coder with discipline, now we have cybersecurity bills that in the long run will make any application making use of C or derived languages, be under similar control as MISRA and friends.

Alterantively, one can use a safer language and not be so strictly regulated, as per those cybersecurity guidelines.

OK but surely there's stuff that you wouldn't do in C. Maybe stuff that would require too much C code. Its features are pretty limited.

This is not my experience. I switched from C++ to C for all my programming. C certainly does not bring much out of the box, but with some data structures libraries ts a very good language for almost all purposes. A lot of bad press which is not really justified IMHO. There is certainly a lot of old bad C code around, but modern C written using modern tools can be quite good. For example, there is no need to do buffer management or string manipulation using open-coded pointer arithmetic, one can wrap this in safe APIs and then it is as safe as in any other language.

Now if the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft could find those C devs to show them how their security departments are doing it all wrong.

Microsoft and Google mainly use C++.

And every single verification framework for C code is way more challenging to work with than systems for a more modern language because in C as soon as you smell an aliasing relationship you are largely fucked for soundness.

> I'd never get in an aircraft where a 'C' compiler was used

So I take it you've never been in an airliner?

> but I'd never get in an aircraft where a 'C' compiler was used for anything

Enjoy walking, I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com