What's up with people seeing an analogy and going "you can't equate those two things"? Analogies aren't equating things

Analogies are great since they talk about how things are the same, and just as terrible because they talk about things that are different.

But seriously it’s sometimes hard to slice out what level of similarity is implied. Obvious things are somewhat less obvious to others sometimes

I feel like the success rate of getting someone off of null terminated strings is probably lower than most rehabilitation programs.

We can't entirely because of the C ABI but apart from that it's as simple as not using C which is not too difficult. C is not a popular language these days.

“Apart from that” does a lot of work here: FFI layers generally talk nul-terminated string unless otherwise specified, so do syscalls.

Yes that's what I said. You can generally wrap those layers so you aren't actually manipulating null terminated strings; just converting to/from them which is not too bad.

I don't know what you're relying on for the idea that C is not a popular language, but it is extremely popular.

Well, you will need to give up SQLite if you really feel this way, and reimplement it in a safe language.

It will also be some time before Rust has substantial penetration into Linux; you might need to find a kernel that implements the POSIX interfaces safely.

These will not be easy problems to solve.

Yeah, no…

I mean it’s a wash, on the one hand zero terminated strings have done untold amounts of damage[0] and are impossible to extirpate once they’re in, on the other hand the nazis were methed (and coked later on) up their eyeballs.

[0] and not just in C itself, unexpected truncation through FFI is an issue which regularly pops up

odbc defines multilingual interface that can accept both null terminated and length bounded strings by using NTS sentinel value for null terminated string length.