These tech images are getting pretty ridiculous. What even is this thumbnail?
It’s how everyone who’s anyone does code reviews!
Only ones who knows how to make proper tech images are the folks at O’Reily publisbing
No.
C is going to be around and useful long after COBOL is collecting dust. Too many core things are built with C. The Linux kernel, the CPython interpreter, etc. Making C go away will require major rewrites of projects that have millions upon millions of hours of development.
Even Fortran has a huge installed base (compared to COBOL) and is still actively used for development. Sometimes the right tool for a job is an old tool, because it is so well refined for a specific task.
Forth anyone?
The rewrite-it-in-rust gang arrives in 3, 2 …
People tend to be obsessed with bleeding edge technology. But those who truly understand know that “bleeding edge” is an anti-pattern and there’s a reason it’s called that: it can bleed you as well.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
That’s the thing, it is broken and there is a fix desperately needed. C lacks memory safety, which is responsible for many, many security vulnerabilities. And they’re entirely avoidable.
So the solution is to take away any agency the developer may have over how their application allocates memory?
Remove the need to, yes. Remove the ability to? No, and rust doesn’t prevent you from doing that, it just makes you mark it
unsafeso that way if you fuck up and cause a memory error, the root cause can be narrowed down to a tiny fragment of the code base.Have you heard of the
unsafeblock in rust?
I agree. And those decades of development come with huge advantages. Libraries. Patterns. Textbooks! Billions of lines of code you can cross reference and learn from!
It’s fun to bleed a little when you are tinkering. It’s not fun to have to reinvent the wheel because you choose a language that doesn’t have an existing ecosystem. That becomes and chicken-and-egg problem. The tinkerers fulfill this role (building out the ecosystem) and also tend to advocate for their tinkering language of choice. But there needs to be a real critical mass.
It takes decades to shift an entrenched ecosystem. Check in ten years if the following exist in languages other than C/C++: an enterprise grade database, a python(/etc.) interpreter that isn’t marked experimental, an OS kernel that is used somewhere real, an embedded manufacturer that ships the language as its first class citizen, a AAA game using it under the engine…
Like, in the last 15 years, I’m only aware of a single AAA game that used a memory safe language – Neverwinter Nights 2 used C# for part of the Electron Engine…
Rust is the most likely candidate here, although you see things like Erlang being used to make some databases (CouchDB). People see Rust being used on some real infrastructure projects that gain actual traction (polars comes to mind). Polars is an interesting use case though – it’s simply better than the other projects in its particular space and so people are switching to it not because it is written in rust at all… And honestly, that’s probably the only way this happens.
Making C go away will require major rewrites of projects that have millions upon millions of hours of development.
Yep. And it’ll be done. Yes it’ll take a while, but this is what it means for C to be like COBOL (which also still exists). But the more and more it can be marginalized the better we’ll all be security-wise.
The rewrite-it-in-rust gang arrives in 3, 2 …
Cattle not pets. They’re just computer languages.
“It’s too much work, so let’s just not do anything and stubbornly stick with a problematic unsafe language that fewer and fewer people are willing to learn”
Certainly, if I had said that.
It’s like the Brits trying to convince everyone else to switch to their electrical socket. Sure, the design is better for higher voltage and current, has all these extra safety features, etc. But you cannot dramatically shift an entrenched ecosystem for free.
Yea, mb, on reread yea.
But still, nothing new should be written in it and everything old should be rewritten or deprecated over time. Entrenched and around, yes, useful…no
There’s very little benefit to starting something new in C and a whole lot of downsides. At least FORTRAN and COBOL have niche use cases. C doesn’t really have a good niche case that something else newer and more secure can’t fill AFAIK
The problem is switching for enterprises because of how much momentum there is. Especially in embedded.
I worked on a 30 year old C code base that’s still being developed now for future products. Some components are literally 20+ years old mostly untouched. Sure they could switch to Rust or something but they’re fucked since nearly none of the staff have relevant experience in anything but the in house C build system and changing over multiple thousands of C files to another language will literally take years even if you got people trained up.
Plus, in embedded pretty much no big HW supplier provides BSPs or drivers in anything but C. If NXP etc. aren’t giving you anything but C, management doesn’t want to start combining languages.
I advocated for Rust when we started a ground-up new project, but got shot down every which way. Only those younger than like 35 were into the idea. Old managers are scared of anything new and their whole life has been C. I don’t know how you convince those kinds of people and maybe we’ll get some movement in another 10 years but enterprises are a slow cautious mess.
My wife was telling me at her work they’re desperate for cobol programmers, as they’re all retiring boomers leaving behind a giant code base. At my work, it’s legacy fortran that’s all over the place, but we’re a much smaller company.
I know COBOL, its pretty easy to pick up honestly. Its just the 40+ years of context and the "WHY"s that they did what they did that is hard.
With how many people are looking for COBOL I really should just make a resume specific to it, put salary * 1.2 and see if any remote positions pop up. Love my job, but with the latest news…
What’s the latest news?
I work in a field that is 1. in the news every day and 2. is seeing HEAVY changes. Im sure you can figure it out ;).
They cant fire me, but I might be on accident haha.
Ouch. Well if you wanna take your chances in Canada, definitely advertise your senior COBOL dev skills! ;)
Can I take a a guess? If not, please ignore the next sentence.
Finance companies with a “database” is a gigantic flat file?
Lol yeah she’s in insurance! I bet you could probably also infer from the fortran that I work for a science-y outfit.
I do not think C is going to completely go away. If nothing more, it will be used as an ABI, to glue various other languages together.
On the other hand, C is going to fade out, not just for memory safety issues, but also due to “language jank”. Usually language design choices that made sense on 60’s and 70’s mainframes, but no longer needed, and later languages tried to rectify them in their “C-influenced” syntax, but had the issue of also being much higher level than C.
Also Rust is just the most hyped replacement for C, and depending on your usecase, other languages might be much better. D has a very close syntax to C without the jank, expecially when used in the betterC mode.
Well COBOL hasn’t completely gone away… I don’t think anyone expects C to become completely extinct; just very legacy.
D missed its chance. Zig is clearly going to be the successor to C, for people who don’t want to use Rust.
That’s a rather misleading headline, it’s completely different from what the article which talks more on adopting good practices.
We’ve already seen a few crotchety old timers who don’t want to add rust to the Linux kernel.
At some point, a complete rewrite of the kernel in a memory safe language would be prudent. Unfortunately, the dinosaurs will have to go extinct before that can happen.
Literally no one is stopping you
Just those crotchety old timers who currently gatekeep the code base.
That doesn’t prevent you from forking it.
The Linux kernel is a few hundred million lines of code, probably. It does need to slowly be moved into a memory safe language.
