[19322] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: crypto for the average programmer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker)
Mon Dec 19 10:11:59 2005
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 07:42:37 +0100 (CET)
To: solinym@gmail.com
Cc: bill.stewart@pobox.com, cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <richard@levitte.org>
In-Reply-To: <d4f1333a0512181956x23c64f4et360d10b32fd5cecb@mail.gmail.com>
In message <d4f1333a0512181956x23c64f4et360d10b32fd5cecb@mail.gmail.com> on Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:56:11 -0600, "Travis H." <solinym@gmail.com> said:
solinym> Anytime someone wants to rewrite a C library in a language
solinym> less prone to buffer overflows, I'm totally for it. Some say
solinym> that "it's not the library, it's the programmer", but I think
solinym> that denies human factors. C simply requires too much
solinym> machinery on top of it to use it securely.
[...]
solinym> And yet cryptographers continue to write in C.
C has three really strong points:
- portability. It's one of the most wide-spread and portable
compiled languages that I know of.
- speed. Most languages with the same level of portability as C that
I know of are interpreted. They will probably never get to the
level of speed you can get with C.
- simple or compatible ABI. C++ could be a good candidate if handled
properly (yeah, yeah, I know), but I've yet to see that the ABI
used by different compilers on the same platform not differ so
much. Most all, I'm thinking of name mangling (uhm, not really
sure if that an ABI issue or not :-)).
As soon as there's a more secure language that fills those criteria, I
see not reason why you'd want to stay with C. In the mean time, we'll
probably have to keep on living with its' defficiencies (I do agree
with you about those).
Cheers,
Richard
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Richard Levitte richard@levitte.org
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