The Free Unixes of the true UNIX DNA lineage have a lint that is a rewrite by Jochen Pohl (done for NetBSD sometime in the early 90's?) Somehow BSD didn't inherit lint. If you use lint on BSD, you're not literally using that program that dates back to 1979.
Other Lints like FlexeLint are proprietary.
C spread like wildfire in the 80's, but an implementation of lint did not follow. Most non-Unix systems that could be programmed in C did not have a lint accompanying that C compiler.
Definitely, it seems there was a lack of promotion of lint from the birthplace of C.
If I were to give a definition of lint, it would be: "that mythical C checking program everyone knows but hasn't used".
It must be suffering from a curse which affects all technology named using a four-letter word starting with L. (Or at least LI.)
Maybe on US, I only got my first contact with C in 1992, via Turbo C 2.0.
Before that already had used multiple languages and was using Turbo Pascal 6.0 by the time I learned C.
Then again, I hardly knew anyone with access to UNIX, my first contact being Xenix in 1994.
This type of experience was quite common in Portugal, who had money to buy expensive UNIX workstations....
Also the fact of being proprietary, well I usually paid for my tools, before FOSS started to be a thing.
And on the same place where they had Turbo C 2.0, they also just got Turbo C++ 1.0.
So there was a tool that had the type system that allowed me to bend C to be more like Turbo Pascal, provided I cared to use the said type system improvements.
Which lead to me never using C++ as an improved C compiler, rather taking advantage of C++ type system to ensure my arrays and strings were properly bound checked, and IO was done safely.
Oh and taking part on C++'s side on the whole C vs C++ USENET debates, since 1994. Or type safety in systems programming vs C.
So these HN and Reddit discussions regarding the C's unsuitability to write safe software, are hardly anything new to me.
The Free Unixes of the true UNIX DNA lineage have a lint that is a rewrite by Jochen Pohl (done for NetBSD sometime in the early 90's?) Somehow BSD didn't inherit lint. If you use lint on BSD, you're not literally using that program that dates back to 1979.
Other Lints like FlexeLint are proprietary.
C spread like wildfire in the 80's, but an implementation of lint did not follow. Most non-Unix systems that could be programmed in C did not have a lint accompanying that C compiler.
Definitely, it seems there was a lack of promotion of lint from the birthplace of C.
If I were to give a definition of lint, it would be: "that mythical C checking program everyone knows but hasn't used".
It must be suffering from a curse which affects all technology named using a four-letter word starting with L. (Or at least LI.)