GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

Posted Dec 24, 2012 20:09 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns by landley
Parent article: GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

Scripting languages like python, ruby, lua, and so on abstract away memory management and type conversions, providing opaque abstractions that you can use without caring how they're implemented.

This is only true if you don't care about the ability to actually use said program or when all the inputs are non-hostile. That's why scripting languages are good for software development and awful for anything else.

Is a dictionary a hash table or a tree?

…say you to yourself and happily use them everywhere. Ten days after release your service is killed by a well-crafted attack and you suddenly need to urgently redo everything while your company is rapidly losing money.

Is the garbage collector mark and sweep or reference counting?

You may not care till your circular structures fill all the memory (if that's reference counting GC and you “don't know and don't care about that”) or, alternatively, till all your backends are tied by the uncollected “Connection” objects and your site no longer accessible.

It doesn't matter, it just works.

…till it does not. Sorry, but all the scripting languages are unbelievably leaky.

Most of the complexity of C programs comes from the program. A significant part of the complexity of C++ programs comes from the language.

This is true for most higher-level languages, not just for C++. And C++ is, in fact, one of the best ones. In my own practice it's much easier to tame C++ compiler rather then JVM's histrionics (and let's not even try to talk about Python). With C++ quite often you find out that code which should compile for some reason refuses do to so, or sometimes it does something strange, but rarely code does what you need in tests but falls apart under real load while “great” scripting languages tend to behave this way regularly.

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