nullability annotations in C

Posted Feb 12, 2025 12:15 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: nullability annotations in C by alx.manpages
Parent article: Maintainer opinions on Rust-for-Linux

But why would you need all that complexity? If you work with strings a lot… wouldn't you have convenience methods?

It Rust you would write something like this:

    [str1, str2, str3].concat().into_boxed_str()

And that's it. In C-like language that doesn't use “dot” to chain functions it would be something like:

   string_to_frozen_string(concat_strings(str1, str2, str2))

Or, maybe, even just

   concat_strings(str1, str2, str2)

Sure, NUL-terminated strings are a bed design from the beginning to the end, but also string.h interface is awful, as whole.

The only justification for that design is the need to produce something decent without optimizing compiler and in 16KB (or were they up to 128KB by then?) of RAM.

Today you have more RAM in your subway ticket and optimizing compilers exist, why stick to all this manual manipulations where none are needed?