Assumed Audience: Hackers who like humble brags. 😛

Discuss on Hacker News.

Epistemic Status: You decide.

On Feb 5, 2023, I posted on Hacker News the article that became my most popular one on that site.

It is called, “Why I Use C When I Believe in Memory Safety.”

I will let you judge whether or not I justified the decision to use C.

But one of my programmer idols, Daniel Stenberg, recently wrote about his experience writing C and how well he did.

Well, I do have a C codebase in “wide” use, and while it is not nearly as old or widely used as curl, it is still data.

I have kept careful track of all “C mistakes” (as Daniel put it), and there are six, about 1 per year. (I started bc in January 2018.)

Daniel compares his work against the 70% number, so I’ll do the same.

Those links say 70% of all security bugs, but since my bc/dc does not have the ! command (to spawn processes) and only reads files, not writes them (except stdout), it’s hard to actually turn a memory safety issue into a security bug, even if it’s possible.

And I gotta count something, so I’ll just count all bugs. C is so unsafe that all bugs could be security bugs anyway.

Okay, so we have six C bugs; how many bugs do we have total?

This information is up-to-date as of the publication of this post.

On my personal code forge, the issue count is four, and one of those is not a bug, but a rant from someone who doesn’t like my copyright notice policy.

So three issues (#3, #8 and #15), none of which are any of the six C bugs.

Let’s look at pull requests on my personal code forge.

There are five, two of which are for the same problem: whether to use POSIX 2008 and not use _XOPEN_SOURCE (#1 and #2).

There is also another that is not technically a bug (#6) since it just silences a Clang warning.

Those could be classified as bugs or not, but I won’t count them to not inflate my numbers.

So two pull requests (#5 and #7) are for bugs, neither of which are one of the six C bugs.

So three issues and two pull requests for bugs: five total.

Now let’s look at GitHub.

There are 38 issues.

I classified 17 as not bugs:

  • #2 (manual problem)
  • #29 (feature request)
  • #30 (release problem)
  • #32 (license problem)
  • #33 (README problem)
  • #37 (question)
  • #43 (feature request)
  • #45 (packaging problem)
  • #46 (release problem)
  • #47 (feature request)
  • #52 (release problem)
  • #58 (question)
  • #59 (praise and suggestion)
  • #61 (bug in downstream test code)
  • #65 (question)
  • #69 (feature request)
  • #70 (feature request)

And I classified 21 as bugs:

If bc failed to build on a platform it previously built on, or had some other unexpected build problem, I usually classify those as bugs.

Those bugs are labelled with “build bug” above.

Same thing with “test bug” items; those are items where the problem was in the test suite.

Of the issues and pull requests on my personal code forge, all of the issues (#3, #8 and #15) are build or test bugs, and both pull requests (#5 and #7) are for real bugs.

I’ll run numbers later with both types removed as bugs.

Now, for GitHub pull requests: there are 34.

I classified 23 as not bugs:

  • #5 (build improvement, but not a bug)
  • #9 (build improvement, but not a bug)
  • #10 (build improvement, but not a bug)
  • #11 (build improvement, but not a bug)
  • #13 (feature request)
  • #15 (feature request)
  • #16 (feature request)
  • #17 (feature request)
  • #18 (feature request)
  • #19 (feature request)
  • #20 (feature request)
  • #21 (feature request)
  • #22 (feature request)
  • #23 (feature request)
  • #24 (style fixes)
  • #26 (translation addition)
  • #28 (typo fix)
  • #38 (refactoring)
  • #49 (typo fix)
  • #54 (build improvement, but not a bug)
  • #57 (documentation fix)
  • #68 (feature request)
  • #72 (feature request)

And I classified 11 as bugs:

It may seem like #14 was not a bug, but a compiler could have considered the mistake as undefined behavior.

In addition, since my bc is used on FreeBSD, there are five bugs reported there.

I have classified two as not bugs:

And I have classified three as bugs:

268076, in particular, has three bugs; all of which were separate and reported by the same user in the course of trying to fix things. Also, it is not a memory bug because the pointer that caused the crash was explicitly initialized to NULL.

In addition, there is one issue that that was reported on my personal code forge that I lost through poor system administration. It was #10, and it was titled:

“scale” not set correctly with -l when first command is a syntax error

and I fixed it in 299a4fd353.

This one was a real bug.

And that takes care of any bugs that I know were reported.

So I have:

  • 3 issues from my code forge.
  • 2 pull requests from my code forge.
  • 21 issues from GitHub.
  • 11 pull requests from GitHub.
  • 5 bugs from 3 issues from https://bugs.freebsd.org/.

And since the six C bugs were actually reported by nobody, but found by myself, we can add them to the total.

So we have 48 bugs, six of which are C bugs. That’s 12.5%, far better than the average of 70%.

However, that includes build and test bugs, of which there are 21. If we take them out, we have 27 bugs left, and 6 of 27 is 22.2%, still far better than average.

And this is where I get to whine!

You see, I’ve only included bugs that were reported on code forges; what about bugs in releases that I found myself? I found all six of the C bugs myself, so why shouldn’t bugs I found myself?

So let’s do that.

After doing a grep on my Git log for “bug”, “Bug”, “issue”, “Issue”, “crash”, “Crash”, “fix”, and “Fix”, grabbing a rough estimation of what was actually in a release, and then removing duplicates (including for reported bugs), I got this list:

It may have some non-release bugs in there, but it’s also probably not complete, so whatever.

Anyway, there are 48 bugs there, so we now have a total of 96. Six of 96 is 6.25%.

If we take out the build and test bugs, we have 37 of the new bugs plus 27 old ones, which is 64. Six of 64 is 9.375%.

So with those numbers, am I a good C programmer?

I’ll let you decide.

But I’ll just add this: if this is what I can do in my spare time, imagine what I could do if I got paid.

Okay, I am NOT a good C programmer; I just may be better than average.

Betteridge’s Law still holds.