C was my first language, more than thirty years ago. I've heard (and probably myself made) the same arguments over and over and over. But those arguments are lame and wrong.
C cannot be made safe (at scale). It's like asbestos. In fact, C is a hazardous material in exactly the same way as asbestos. Naturally occurring, but over industrialized and deployed far too widely before its dangers were known. Still has its uses but it will fuck you up if you do not use industrial-grade PPE.
Stop using C if you can. Stop arguing other people should use it. There have always been alternatives and the opportunity cost of ecosystems continuing to invest in C has massive externalized costs for the entire industry and society as a whole.
> When C code is run in machines capable of failing with gruesome death, its unsafeness may indeed result in gruesome death.
And yet, it never does. It's been powering those types of machines likely longer than you have been alive, and the one exception I can think of where lives were lost, the experts found that the development process was at fault, not the language.
If it was as bad as you make out, we'd have many many many occurrences of this starting in the 80s. We don't.
How was this flamebait? It is an example of how bad programming choices/assumptions/guardrails costs lives, a counterargument to the statement of 'And yet, it never does'. Splitting hairs if the language is C or assembly is missing the spirit of the argument, as both those languages share the linguistic footguns that made this horrible situation happen (but hey, it _was_ the 80s and choices of languages was limited!). Though, even allowing the "well ackuacally" cop-out argument, it is trivial to find examples of code in C causing failures due to out-of-bounds usage of memory; these bugs are found constantly (and reported here, on HN!). Now, you would need to argue, "well _none_ of those programs are used in life-saving tech" or "well _none_ of those failures would, could, or did cause injury", to which I call shenanigans. The link drop was meant to do just that.
We need to agree to disagree on this one; the claim that C is fine and does not cause harm due to its multitude of foot-guns, I think, is an egregious and false claim. So don't make false claims and don't post toxic positivity, I guess?
C cannot be made safe (at scale). It's like asbestos. In fact, C is a hazardous material in exactly the same way as asbestos. Naturally occurring, but over industrialized and deployed far too widely before its dangers were known. Still has its uses but it will fuck you up if you do not use industrial-grade PPE.
Stop using C if you can. Stop arguing other people should use it. There have always been alternatives and the opportunity cost of ecosystems continuing to invest in C has massive externalized costs for the entire industry and society as a whole.