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On Fri, 7 Nov 2025, Simon Waters wrote:
I think Assembler, C, and C++ basically make it too easy to go wrong. I know I have released code with such issues.
Anyone looked at FiL C yet? https://github.com/pizlonator/fil-c/blob/deluge/Manifesto.mdIt does look interesting and may well help migration of lots of existing code without having to e.g. re-write in rust or something else.
I'm mostly C, Basic, BCPL and assembler these days. If you ever want a language that can trivially blow up in your face then it's BCPL. Especially on a platform with no memory management. Saying that, I've written an OS in it with some of the "usual" utilities but if I were to assemble a team to write e.g. a graphical user system to run on-top of it then that alone would probably be 10x the size of the existing codebase and be as buggy as a windscreen last summer...
The Basics I use were both written by me - one in C one in assembler. I find them manageable as they're written in a mostly modular fashion so easy to do tests on. (and valgrind to the rescue for the C stuff) but for most commercial projects, it's a team of coders, each with their own but similar ideas so testing the whole starts to be become harder.
And I don't think that's going to improve no matter what the language is. Projects are getting larger and larger...
At the start of this year I was introduced to "no code" websites. Great - when they work - websites, shopping sites, social media integration, email, forms, databases all sitting behind clever fancy interfaces, each one in a different cloud with "plumbing" to connect them all together - managed in another cloud, of-course.
With each cloud having a few million lines of code behind it... What could possibly go wrong..
Still, there's always the vibe... May your computed GOTOs never fail. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/