this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Question would be rather: why is something like C++ needed for such simple apps?
C++ seems to be in that weird in-between place of offering high level features to be reasonable productive, but still doesn't enforce/guarantee anything to make these features safe. I'd argue, very few programs need that. Either you're writing business stuff, then you want safety (Java, C#, rust), or you're writing embedded/low level stuff, then you want control (C, ASM).
The room for "productive, but not interested in safety" is basically just AAA games, I guess.
C is almost the old "steady" standard now it feels like. It's so flexible and the frameworks are already built..
...except that we also end up with cracks in our foundations like this exploit constantly being exposed as a result of all that C
Well you're not going to write asm if you want your code to be portable at all, and believe it or not C++ has a lot of features to help you not shoot yourself in the foot that C doesn't have (ex. OOP, RAII, smart pointers).
C wasn't really designed with dynamic memory management in mind. It was designed for someone who has absolute control over a machine and all the memory in it.
malloc()andfree()are just functions that some environments expose to user mode processes, but C was never designed to care where you got your memory or what you do with it.