en/programming/safety.txt
2004-05-12
Safety is paramount
Most programming languages designed before 1980's were safe. All well-formed programs had well-defined meaning. The main exceptions were very low-level languages where run-time tests for indexes and such things were just too expensive. From this low-level tradition came C.
Then for some very strange reason C became popular for general-purpose programming. It has been in to avoid safety as much as possible ever since then.
For most programming tasks, safety is much more important than speed. It seems it's only now that people are realizing it. If we hadn't made the C mistake, we wouldn't need to be paying for it with all those buffer overflows.
Cyclone looks like a useful C replacement for most projects. Never tried it for real, though.
23:54 - /en/programming - 3 comments
