One of the worst UI ever

Posted Jan 28, 2026 15:39 UTC (Wed) by Heretic_Blacksheep (subscriber, #169992)
In reply to: One of the worst UI ever by lmartelli
Parent article: A critical GnuPG security update

But not the only choice in 1997. There were better languages and tooling even in 1997 like Ada, but tribal/religious arguments poopooed them similar to the nasty back and forth between C zealots and other systems oriented languages today.

One of the worst UI ever

Posted Jan 28, 2026 16:22 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Ada's major fault back in 1999 (when I looked at it for work purposes) was the lack of a decent, Free (or even cheap) compiler. GNAT didn't become a decent Ada compiler until 2004 or so.

It was literally priced out of the market at the time - Keil's C compiler for Infineon C16x, while awful, was the same price for a company-wide licence as the cheapest Ada compiler I could find, and that would have been an add-on to VxWorks.

One of the worst UI ever

Posted Jan 31, 2026 14:31 UTC (Sat) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

The problem that leads many cryptography libraries to use C, even in modern times, is that C gives you tooling to write constant-time code -- no runtime, obscene pointer semantics that make it possible to prevent compiler assumptions about pointer access ordering or aliasing (and extensions for explicit fences and the like); the ability to write zero-heap-allocation code; low-level debuggers and dissemblers; and of course, inline assembler.

C is arguably awful at each individual thing I listed, but it has them all, and to the extent that some of them are a black art, there exist people with decades of experience working with popular compilers to achieve them.

Now, maybe gnupg could've written its core secret-data-handling crypto algorithms in C (or assembler) and used FFI bindings to use a nicer language for everything else. But then you'd need a language and toolchain that can mix well with C.