C is Brittle D is Plastic

[Walter Bright]

On 4/5/2026 3:28 AM, Derek Fawcus wrote:
> On Sunday, 5 April 2026 at 00:15:33 UTC, Cid Lib wrote:
>>
>> Fixing 'pointer decay' with fat pointers is like upgrading the locks on your 
>> front door while the house is built on a shifting swamp.
> 
> It has always been possible to avoid pointer decay for fixed size buffers, it is 
> just that that the syntax is ugly, and the use cases are limited.

I've never seen it used. It's too awkward.


> Having been assigned to work on some old code, adjusting APIs to use that form 
> (or where difficult the newer "char buf[static X]" combined with static analysis 
> (and warning flags) has been an easy improvement.

Static analysis cannot reliably detect array overflows. It's that old halting 
problem.


> Rewriting in a different language is a much more risky task, and generally an 
> impossible sell to management.

AI has proven to be useful in translating code to a different language.