C is Brittle D is Plastic

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Monday, 23 March 2026 at 01:51:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

> As I've become more experienced, my tolerance for all the weird 
> kludges necessary for professional C getting lower and lower. 
> LLMs don't really solve the problem, as the wrangled C code is 
> just as ugly looking.

I recently watched a YouTube video about how LLMs produce almost 
correct code. It's just good enough that errors slip past the 
code reviewers, and then down the road you're dealing with those 
errors as they get caught in production. It hit home, because it 
matches my experience. The trustworthy solution to the problem 
under discussion here is to have the LLM write a parser and 
transpile the old code to its new form. Using D and not having to 
decide on the trustworthy path is obviously a win.