Deadlocks are a solved problem in theory — we’ve known how to prevent them since 1971. The challenge is making that prevention ergonomic enough that people actually use it. Surelock is my attempt at that: lean into Rust’s type system to make the correct thing the easy thing, and make the wrong thing a compiler error.

But my point is not to bash C.

My point is that this API quirk fundamentally changes how people think about endianness, making them commit mistakes they wouldn’t make otherwise. Many people think integers have an intrinsic endianness, or prefer textual formats to seemingly avoid dealing with endianness, and I have held all these convictions myself at some point.

It’s not that people are stupid. It’s borderline impossible to make the same mistakes if you treat endianness as a parameter of a serialization format. But C doesn’t want you to think about it this way, and so you never realize you were lied to until you get a reason to think hard about it.

It took thousands of talented people decades of hard work and innovation to build the giant and deep iceberg, that is the computer software infrastructure of today. I know that you are ignorant of the complexity of what you can’t comprehend, but if you think a fancy autocomplete machine has the slightest chance of maintaining this monumental human achievement, expand on it and keep it running for the years to come, then you might be in for an unpleasant surprise.