On 7/31/2003 at 18:30:12 +0000, Paul Vixie said:

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However, since improvements are always welcome, please recommend tools which would allow us to progress "above and beyond" C and it's deficencies.

I've never been able to program a buffer overrun vulnerability in Modula 3, or Perl, or any version of Lisp or Scheme. It's possible that the physics has advanced enough that "low level programming" now costs more than it saves.

On the other hand, compiled C is still significantly faster than, say, Perl or Java. That may not be important for some apps, but when you're pushing hardware to its very limits (you know, the most important stuff on the Net, like playing games and serving porn) you can really feel it. And if there's a security hole or exploitable bug in Perl or Java itself, it exists in every program written with it. There's nothing wrong with low level languages, and with the proper libraries, they gain some of the advantages of high level languages. Personally, it'll be a long time before I'm convinced that I want my routers running Java. (Like how I brought that almost back on topic in the end, there?)