When I became a team leader at my last job, my first priority was making a list of parts of the language we must never use because of our high reliability requirement.

[–] brisk@aussie.zone 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Care to share any favourites?

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

strtok is a worst offender that comes to mind. Global state. Pretty much just waiting to bite you in the ass and it did, multiple times.

[–] mormegil@programming.dev 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Sure, strtok is a terrible misfeature, a relic of ancient times, but it's plainly the heritage of C, not C++ (just like e.g. strcpy). The C++ problems are things like braced initialization list having different meaning depending on the set of available constructors, or the significantly non-zero cost of various abstractions, caused by strange backward-compatible limitations of the standard/ABI definitions, or the distinctness of vector<bool> etc.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 4 points 5 months ago

No you are right! Honestly it was several years ago and I struggled to remember exactly what I came up with before I left.

In our application we for example never use dynamic memory allocation. It has to be done very carefully so we don’t crash. Problem is there’s lots of sneaky ways one can accidentally do it from the standard library.

[–] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

Faust bless those who added strtok_s to C11.