C programming language

“C has lot of negative points (easy to create buffer overflows, integer overflows, use-after-free, and other vulnerabilities)”

“the only programming language book that my feeble mind was able to read all the way to the end and (at least it seemed) understood every single thing!”

“C without UB is basically impossible, but C that does the right thing based on assumptions about the platform is possible”

“Evidence shows you need wisdom, discipline, and an impossibly high bar of encyclopedic knowledge of every feature of C”

“just write it in C and benefit from the faster toolchain and the more comprehensive suite of tools”

“'C' seems to be a language that makes it easy to write incomprehensible statements, but it's not that hard to write code that is trivial bring up to date”

“Easy to start with (with CodeBlocks on Windows and gcc on Linux) and the concepts were nicely explained.”

“C seems to me a really poor choice because it's barely more expressive than one of the machine code architectures”

“C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine.”

“The problem with C is that modern compilers do a lot of transformations between your source code and the final machine code”

“if you wrote C for low level, Lisp for high level, and compiled the software to run in an Intel 8080 emulator, that combo would likely still work in 50 years”

“Fast compilation times, long-term stability, portability to many architectures, multiple implementations”

“It's about proving correctness of programs more generally, so any C programmer not looking at it because they know about Valgrind are choosing to skip something interesting”

“C allows you to program all systems from Desktop/Server to all Embedded MCUs (simple or complex).”

“It is very easy to read without much knowledge and has a big base of knowledge around for decades.”

“C and C++ are good tools to make the absolute fastest and lightest software in a great many cases.”

“as much as I love C, that would just be stupid if your goal is anything other than fun and experimentation”

“C is kind of bad at its job, but nothing else has the "compatible with everything" badge of honor.”

“the shear amount of CVE and crashes are much worse in terms of global energy usage than if it were safe”

“as someone writing numerical code (clusters, NUMA, SIMD, etc.) I think C is still the ideal tool for this”

“There isn't a language that achieves C's performance, access to hardware and portability while also having superior syntax.”

“It’s meant to be used as a systems language that’s as close to assembly as possible while remaining portable”

“I still prefer C for new projects to any other language, because I value short compilation time and reduced complexity.”

“Well written C code, especially for the purpose of writing and continuing to maintain mature GNU coreutils, is not a big risk”

“my manually written (non-trivial) projects C hits fewer undefined behaviour than even trivial projects constructed with an LLM”

“stuff where you need simplicity, fast compilation times, portability, interoperability with legacy systems, or high-performance - C”

“That can work if you have strong architectural discipline and are willing to pay the upfront cost. Most teams are not.”

“C hit a perfect balance of being a small enough language to grok, being indepedent of the system manufacturers”

“It doesn't hide the issues behind some language abstraction, you are in full control of what the machine does.”

“Instead it remains stuck in a design from the 1970s, and has compromised semantics that result from the severe memory constraints of those days.”

“reasons intrinsic to C, such as the risk of memory over/underflow, use after free, problematic numeric promotion”

“The fact that C was effectively "born old" means you can take a C89 program and compile it as C23 and it should simply work”

“Plain and simple C is, by far, one of the current _LESS WORSE_ performant alternatives which can be used”

“most of the C programs that I have written, including 80% of FFmpeg, can run on computers much older than that.”

“And it's super fun! Being able to compile a little C utility that lives in the Windows tray and has a menu, etc. is exhilarating.”

“specially designed embedded C code can survive total RAM erasure and still perform some meaningful work”

“Proper strings and arrays for starters, instead of being pointers that the programmer is responsible for doing length housekeeping.”

“Stick to C, not Python or Rust, it is much easier to understand because the abstractions are just there to hide code.”

“C has such types and can guarantee that there is no out-of-bounds access at run-time in the scenarios you describe”

“That's one of the fundamental issues with C. We're all imperfect idiots some of the time and one instance of undefined behavior breaks any guarantees the language gives you.”