[HN Gopher] Binary Banshees and Digital Demons
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       Binary Banshees and Digital Demons
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2021-09-23 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thephd.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thephd.dev)
        
       | rwj wrote:
       | Perhaps true, but not the main topic of this post. C and C++ are
       | at the foundation of a great deal of software, and that creates a
       | lot of pressure for stability. This is blocking evolution of both
       | languages. Stability is great, but stagnation (sooner or later)
       | will get you.
        
       | alilleybrinker wrote:
       | The combination of the following seems like a key problem:
       | 
       | 1. Refusal to break ABI compatibility (so no changes to existing
       | APIs if they cause breakage)
       | 
       | 2. Refusal to introduce replacement APIs which can exist
       | alongside the old ones (so you also can't have, to use the
       | article's example, "regex2")
       | 
       | In isolation, either of these policies is fine, but having both
       | together seems like a refusal to improve.
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | Sooner or later we're going to have to accept that C family
       | languages are fundamentally broken and unsafe at any speed for
       | new development.
        
         | junon wrote:
         | But that's not a true statement, is it?
        
         | carapace wrote:
         | Halfway through that horror story I found myself thinking,
         | "Egad! I like rust now."
        
         | qualudeheart wrote:
         | Finally we'll be able to rewrite everything in Rust and Haskell
         | and Ocaml and Ada and ATS with built in theorem provers to
         | enforce correctness.
        
       | qualudeheart wrote:
       | What about non-binary banshees?
        
       | KronisLV wrote:
       | This might be off topic, but the illustrations in the article are
       | nice! Crux really did a good job there.
       | 
       | In regards to the actual article: as someone who primarily works
       | in higher abstraction level languages (Java, .NET, Ruby, Python,
       | ...), i find it really nice that i can spend more time thinking
       | about domain/business concepts and problems, instead of worrying
       | about the lower level concerns. My hat's off to the people who
       | valiantly work on the lower levels of the stack.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-23 23:01 UTC)