On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
I’m just glad to see the White House listening to people who understand technology for a change.
I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn’t so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.
You don’t have to ban C or C++; you just have to prove your programs are memory safe. It’s been decades since I’ve coded in C, but surely Valgrind and ilk are now capable of providing reasonable proof of memory safety. You might have to turn up all the dials and set all-warnings-are-errors, but I’d be surprised if C tooling wasn’t available to provide sufficient proof for a given statically-linked program.
I’d be surprised if C tooling wasn’t available to provide sufficient proof for a given statically-linked program.
Be prepared to be surprised then. If such tooling was available, why isn’t it being used by the projects for whom it matters? Yes, there is tooling available, but all the big parties using them are admitting it’s not good enough for them. Those tools help, but they do fail in the “sufficient proof” department.
For some follow-up reading:
- Microsoft: https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2019/07/why-rust-for-safe-systems-programming/
- Chromium: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/01/supporting-use-of-rust-in-chromium.html
- Android: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html
- Apple: https://security.apple.com/blog/towards-the-next-generation-of-xnu-memory-safety/
They all share the same basic facts: C and C++ are inherently memory unsafe. If any of them could’ve “just prove[n] your programs are memory safe”, I think they would have.
We need legislators who aren’t all literally older than cryptography. If they weren’t bought and paid for by billionaires that would be nice too.
Don’t blame the victims for a sham of a democracy. First-past-the-post (FPTP) is there to prevent anything outside of a two party system where primaries are filled with (fully allowed) election fraud and cheating.
“we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right.” - DNC Lawyer
It requires score voting so that, even if heavily gerrymandered, one can still meaningfully express a preference without throwing one’s ballot in the garbage.
