In the modern landscape of software engineering, there is significant and growing pressure to migrate toward memory-safe languages like Rust or Zig. Proponents of these languages often argue that the inherent risks of C—such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors—make it a "hazardous material" unsuitable for modern, internet-connected systems. However, the continued dominance of C in critical infrastructure projects like SQLite reveals a nuanced reality where "old and boring" is often a strategic advantage.
The Power of the "Boring" Language
A primary reason high-stakes projects choose C is its long-term stability and maturity. C is designed by a conservative committee that prioritizes backward compatibility, ensuring that a program written decades ago can likely compile today with minimal changes. This is essential for projects like SQLite, which aim for support roadmaps extending into the 2050s or 2060s. While newer languages like Rust offer innovative features, they are often seen as moving targets that change too quickly for projects requiring multi-decade stability.
The Universal Lingua Franca
C remains the universal language for systems programming because nearly every existing system can call C libraries. Libraries written in C++ or Java are often difficult to invoke from other languages like Haskell or Swift without significant effort, whereas a C API is callable from almost any environment. This "portability and embeddability" allows a single library to serve as a reliable "black box" across platforms ranging from high-level web servers to tiny microcontrollers.
Rethinking the "Safety" Debate
While Rust provides compile-time discipline that enforces memory safety, some veteran developers argue that this comes at the cost of increased complexity and slower compilation times. In contrast, C allows for a highly optimized, procedural style that stays close to the hardware. SQLite, for example, achieves high reliability not through language-level safety, but through an exhaustive test suite that is nearly 600 times larger than the library itself.
Furthermore, some specific quality strategies used in C are actually hindered by "safe" languages:
- 100% Branch Coverage: SQLite requires 100% machine-code branch testing. Safe languages often insert implicit defensive checks (like array bounds verification) that create branches in machine code that can never be taken in "correct" code, making 100% coverage technically impossible.
- OOM Recovery: SQLite is designed to recover gracefully from Out-Of-Memory (OOM) situations. Many modern safe languages are designed to "panic" or abort on OOM, which is unacceptable for a database meant to run on bare-metal or embedded systems.
The "Object-Oriented" Pitfall
The sources suggest that the trend of moving away from Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is gaining traction. Critics argue that OOP encapsulation often fuses data and behavior too rigidly, leading to increased complexity and tech debt as a system evolves. C’s procedural approach, which emphasizes data-oriented design and static functions, avoids these "cathartic traps" by keeping the system modular and adaptable to design changes.
Conclusion
While languages like Rust are a "breath of fresh air" for new development that requires high memory discipline, C remains the best tool for universal libraries that must stand the test of time. The choice of a programming language should be a deliberate, measured decision based on the specific needs of the project—such as performance, testing requirements, and target platforms—rather than a reaction to industry trends.
In many ways, programming languages are like math; just because a concept is old doesn't mean it's outdated. Just as we don't say the square root is obsolete, the fundamental simplicity and ubiquity of C ensure its place as the bedrock of the computing world for the foreseeable future.
...till the next post, bye-bye & take care.