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submitted 2 months ago by ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world to c/196

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[-] JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world 34 points 2 months ago

Just started uni and theyre having us learn C

It's only been a couple weeks and it's not too bad, but every time I bring up to someone that I'm learning C they express sympathy, which makes me think I'm eventually gonna hit a brick wall of a learning curve.

[-] ColonelThirtyTwo@pawb.social 48 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's mostly because C is notorious for not holding your hand and not telling you when you mess up. Write one past the array's length? Might do nothing, might crash, might mess up some other data, might crash later in somewhere completely different.

[-] JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

I spent 30 minutes looking over my code because I forgot a semicolon after defining an integer :(

[-] Wirlocke 14 points 2 months ago

Or in some cases might crash 8.5 million computers worldwide.

Yes the Crowdstrike crash was caused by going 1 past an array length, caused by a magic number index and a regex mistake, and wasn't caught because the tests didn't work.

The whole thing was a compound series of amateur mistakes, but with kernel access at boot time.