[TUHS] Is C obsolete? (was Re: [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[Dan Stromberg]

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 4:33 PM Derek Fawcus <
dfawcus+lists-tuhs at employees.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 05:49:57PM +0200, Andy Kosela wrote:
> > They also think that C is obsolete
>
> I'd not say it is obsolete, but despite it having been my main language
> for the
> last 30 years, these days I would be inclined to restrict the range of new
> tasks
> I'd use it for.
>
Me too - I write far fewer things in C today than I once did.  Last time I
used C, it was for something that needed mlockall() and very minimalist OS
dependencies.  And the client was in Python - only the server was in C.

I think Rust is probably the better language, even though Go is ahead of it
in the Tiobe language popularity rankings.  Go is more like what most
people are accustomed to, but Rust is a genuine advancement in language
design that justifies "fighting the borrow checker".

On the other hand, I did a little comparison of Rust md5 (I know, it's
broken) implementations, and found them surprisingly slow.  Slower than
CPython - though CPython is just linking to OpenSSL, and OpenSSL is
probably using hand-coded assembler, or at least highly optimized C.
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