Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus on Nostr: As I keep reading over the PHP patches I keep seeing the devastation not of people ...

As I keep reading over the PHP patches I keep seeing the devastation not of people who don't know how to write secure software, but decades of people with very little resources tasked with writing the most widely used internet-facing software on earth in the programming language I am a participant in shaping. I see that the slow pace of adoption of things that we were told would help people 20, 30 years ago by security experts has not been adopted, and some of the world's most complex codebases using things as fragile as setjmp/longjmp and abort for error handling.

I see, simply, that we are failing our software engineers by not having better in-language tools to mitigate and manage this level of complexity. That the pride in hacks we wore as a symbol of the power of C were in fact cries for help from a userbase that did not understand the long tail of consequences.

Good luck and God Bless to the system administrators today and tomorrow and for the rest of this month. I'll do my best to make it so C isn't like this, anymore.