alt Hacker NewsAs a C programmer, I find this kind of bad faith article very irritating.
Yes, the standard library is bad. This is by far the worst part of the C legacy. But it is not that hard to write your own.
String functions like this are not difficult at all, and you can use better naming and semantics, write faster code etc.
C is not the C standard library, ffs.
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Exactly. A wrapper that handles all of the edge cases properly and gives proper reporting just gets added to your own library of functions and the devs get used to using it. Much like the code for abstract data types like lists/hashmaps/etc which neither C nor the standard libraries provide.
Bonus points for having bespoke linting rules to point out the use of known “bad” functions.
In one old project we went through and replaced all instances of sprintf() with snprintf() or equivalent. Once we were happy that we’d got every occurrence we could then add lint rules to flag up any new use of sprintf() so that devs didn’t introduce new possible problems into the code.
(Obviously you can still introduce plenty of problems with snprintf() but we learned to give that more scrutiny.)
The thing I find irritating is all the folks who say C is broken because it’s not a write once run anywhere language like JavaScript or python. Part of the deal has always been that the programmer needs to understand the target platform and the target compiler’s behavior.
The people downvoting you are probably not C programmers and love to hate C.
I don't think it's in bad faith.
The distinction between a language and its standard library gets blurry even in theory, and in practice they're nearly inseparable. If a language's standard library has four ways of doing almost the same thing, and they're all fundamentally broken, that's a problem.