Why C? [LWN.net]

Why C?

Posted Nov 14, 2002 22:33 UTC (Thu) by larsga (guest, #2801)
Parent article: Another set of bind vulnerabilities

It's tempting to conclude that the real problem is programming languages that allow you to make this sort of error. There are many languages which offer similar performance to C/C++ without requiring you take off your life jacket. Several of the functional programming languages, Common Lisp, Eiffel, and several others. Java does not have this problem, but has lower performance and is not suitable for everything.

In other words, maybe this will be what finally makes us get rid of these obsolete languages...

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Why C?

Posted Nov 15, 2002 4:39 UTC (Fri) by macfisherman (guest, #6018) [Link] (2 responses)

Just because C allows one to shoot themselves in the foot doesn't make it an obsolete language. I believe you answered you own question. Speed.

Why not OCaml?

Posted Nov 15, 2002 7:52 UTC (Fri) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

There are high level languages that are as efficient as C but prevent buffer overflows, according to the Great Programming Language shootout, e.g. OCaml. Have a look at http://donkin.org/bin/view/Main/OCamlLanguage for an overview and links to the shootout results - given reasonable weightings for memory, CPU and code length, OCaml comes out top. It has full socket functionality and a good module library so there's no reason why a DNS server couldn't be written in it.

Why C?

Posted Nov 18, 2002 23:32 UTC (Mon) by larsga (guest, #2801) [Link]

As you said, it is not that it is unsafe that makes C obsolete; its obsolesence goes much deeper than that. As for speed, I said explicitly that other languages have comparable speed, and for a DNS server CPU time is not the limiting factor on performance.