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Secure, Efficient and Easy C programming

Posted by michael on from the oxymorons dept.

cras writes "Feeling a bit of masochist today.. First in the morning I wrote Secure, Efficient and Easy C Programming Mini-HOWTO. And since I already spent a few hours with it, I figured I might just as well see what Slashdot people would think about it."

7 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Secure, Efficient and Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pick any two.

  2. future plans? by napoleonin · · Score: 5, Funny

    "First in the morning I wrote Secure, Efficient and Easy C Programming Mini-HOWTO..."

    Damn. What are your plans for the rest of the day?

    1. Re:future plans? by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe make it a HOWTO rather than a Mini-HOWTO? Hell, I could write a mini-HOWTO right here...

      SECURE

      1) Don't use strcpy.

      2) Don't assume data coming in from the world is within valid limits

      EFFICIENT

      1) Avoid moving/copying large amounts of data whenever possible. Work in place.

      EASY

      1) Don't redefine the language using macros (e.g., define BEGIN {, #define END })

      2) Comment your source

      3) Use The One True Brace Style. All others are heretical crap.

      Damn, now what do I do with the rest of my day?

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
  3. Mirror of HOW-TO in case it gets slashdotted by CableModemSniper · · Score: 5, Funny

    1) Use python with C bindings

    --
    Why not fork?
  4. You Forgot: by asv108 · · Score: 5, Funny
    You forgot to add the obligatory "in XX days" or "XX hours" to your title. So a better title for this story would be:

    "Secure, Efficient and Easy C programming in 24hrs"

  5. Re:+1 Insightful by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perl is for idiots who think regexps can solve all problems.

    s/idiots/wise souls/
    s/think/know/

    Problem solved.

    --

    I write in my journal
  6. Re:a little short?? by dvdeug · · Score: 5, Funny

    Damn true, using C for other thing than low-level stuff really is a bad habit.

    Oh, God, another Visual Basic user who writes code with a mouse. Spare me.

    Yes, because it's better to spend weeks and months carefully constructing a GUI by hand then to put it together in a couple days with a mouse. Especially if it's going to be used by three or four people; by God, it's more than worth it to the company for me to spend two or three months on the project (@ $60,000 a year) so those people can get their results back in a couple seconds rather than a couple minutes.

    It's also better to spend weeks and months writing an efficent text processing program in C and worrying about buffer overflows and memory leaks, rather then writting it in a couple days in Perl or Snobol. Who cares that the results will inevitably be piped to less and studied for a few minutes; the fact that we shaved off 40% of 2 seconds (and added an obscure error case) is more than worth it!

    Actually: Oh, God, another C programmer that will make me suffer through anonymous core dumps because his programming language is so much more macho, and so much more efficent (really wish he understand how to use Big-O notation and switch algorithms, but he spent so much time programming this one and dubugging it that he can't afford to switch. Too bad he doesn't use a language with efficent control structures predebugged and optimized.)