[Cryptography] tail recursion in C [was Re: "NSA-linked Cisco exploit poses bigger threat than previously thought"]

[Ron Garret]

On Aug 27, 2016, at 7:16 AM, Howard Chu <hyc at symas.com> wrote:

> Ron Garret wrote:
>> All of these are reasons why I dispute the claim that C is “a good portable assembler.”  C is a really cool hack that lets you do amazing things under very tight resource constraints.  But it’s not 1970 any more.  We don’t need to run our compilers on machines with 64k of RAM.  But for some reason we are still programming with a language designed primarily to meet that constraint.
> 
> It's not 1970 any more but we're still living in a world where electricity isn't free. Pretending that you have the freedom to use as inefficient a language as you want has significant real-world costs. Particularly today when most general computing is now being done with hand-held or body-worn devices with limited battery life.
> 
> We live in a world of finite resources. We are all always operating under very tight resource constraints. Wasting cycles or bytes is not doing anyone any favors.

You can’t be serious.  Remember, we’re not talking about the efficiency of the compiled code here, we’re talking about the efficiency of the *compiler*.  Arguing that we should use unsafe languages in order to conserve electricity is just ridiculous.

rg