Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

> C's not without its shortcomings, but this notion that it's inappropriate for today's machines because it was initially run on a PDP-11 seems rather silly. Some of those shortcomings:

It's not that it's inappropriate. One of its major failings is that people *think* it's low level, but it doesn't map that well to what modern processors actually DO. In short, we treat it like the low-level language it *was*.

And it's that disconnect between what we think, and what actually happens, that causes all the problems.

Let's take your "unsafety" point, for example. On a PDP-11, I could have easily reasoned about what was ACTUALLY HAPPENING inside the CPU. That's not to say my programming is perfect, but my mental model of reality would have been reasonably close to reality. Nowadays, that's not true AT ALL.

And that's what bites kernel programmers all the time. Especially the noobs, their mental model of what's going on is wildly out of kilter with reality. The compiler takes the code they wrote and massively rewrites it behind their backs. And then the CPU effectively runs the object code in an interpreter I often get the impression ...

That's the point of a low-level language. Imho, if you have well-written code in a low-level language, the compiler SHOULD NOT be able to do that much optimisation. That's not a description of modern C !!!

And therein lies our problem.

Cheers,
Wol