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Steve Baker
Writing C code is programming without a safety net. Someone once described it to me as like riding a motorbike - it’s fast, fun - but when you wipe out, it’s very, very bad indeed. Languages like Java are about as much fun as driving a light brown 1980 Volvo estate wagon. Slow, unmanouverable, boring as all hell - but safe.
In C, you’re programming very close to the raw hardware - so you can very easily mess up extremely badly, and in ways that are tough to debug. For people who know assembly language - you can almost see in your head how your C code is going to be converted into machine code because there is nothing very fancy going on.
So, for example - I can write to the actual RAM memory location at address 0x12345678 by writing something like (char *)(0x12345678) = 23 ; - that’s an insanely dangerous thing to be able to do! But if you’re programming a device driver, and the device’s data register happens to be at that address - then that’s an incredibly powerful, efficient and useful thing to be able to do!
But you can easily make mistakes like allocating some memory, then accidentally de-allocating it - and then writing to it - and all hell will break loose!
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Writing C code is programming without a safety net. Someone once described it to me as like riding a motorbike - it’s fast, fun - but when you wipe out, it’s very, very bad indeed. Languages like Java are about as much fun as driving a light brown 1980 Volvo estate wagon. Slow, unmanouverable, boring as all hell - but safe.
In C, you’re programming very close to the raw hardware - so you can very easily mess up extremely badly, and in ways that are tough to debug. For people who know assembly language - you can almost see in your head how your C code is going to be converted into machine code because there is nothing very fancy going on.
So, for example - I can write to the actual RAM memory location at address 0x12345678 by writing something like (char *)(0x12345678) = 23 ; - that’s an insanely dangerous thing to be able to do! But if you’re programming a device driver, and the device’s data register happens to be at that address - then that’s an incredibly powerful, efficient and useful thing to be able to do!
But you can easily make mistakes like allocating some memory, then accidentally de-allocating it - and then writing to it - and all hell will break loose!
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
