Linus was a hypocritical asshole here, but more to the point, why are they using strings for this anyway? No byte arrays / literals in their C dialect?
My layman understanding is that it's the other way around, C doesn't have a string type.
Since C doesn't have a string type, "quoted strings" are actually char[] but with '\0' as an extra last character.
People have therefore made warnings happen when defining a char[] which silently truncates the '\0', because that's a common source of bugs.
They've then had to develop a way of easily disabling that warning from being generated, because it's also common enough to want to avoid the warning.
All of this seems insane coming from a modern language.
But look at the complete disaster that was the Python 2 -> 3 migration, a large motivator for which was "fixing" strings from a non-unicode to unicode compatible type. A decade or more of lost productivity as people struggled to migrate.
There's no way to actually fix C. Just keep recommending that people don't use it.
Yep, agreed on all accounts; I'm an advocate for Rust for Linux for these reasons, among others.
My thinking was that the Linux kernel already uses a custom dialect of C with specific features that benefit their workflow; I'm surprised that one of those features wasn't a
char[] charset = b"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
that would allow for intent to be signalled to the compiler.
