I’ve been programming in C since I was 14 years old (1980) and I still love to code in this language. However, as much as I love C, there are certain classes of bugs that are very difficult to find, but typically have easy solutions once you do find them:

• memory corruption
• memory leak
• double-free
• thread race conditions
• mutex dead-locks

Lots of younger programmers often say why don’t you write in another language with built-in garbage collection? This would resolve the first three types of bugs by making it the language’s problem to solve. My usual response is speed, portability, and “how I think“. That last one is important. Continue reading →