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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Working with habits is just not good enough. C++ has far too many footguns to be considered a safe language and there are frankly objectively better modern alternatives that you should use instead, perhaps except if you have a really large legacy code base you can't replace (but even then, consider calling into it via FFI from a safe language).

Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.

C++ is not a viable language for the future.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I get kinda bad vibes from this comment and I'd like to explain why...

If somebody said "We're building a point of sale terminal and to make it secure we're going to be using C++" I'd probably have a dumbfounded expression on my face unless they immediately continued with "because there are libraries we can lean on to minimize the amount of code we need to write."

C++ has an extremely mature ecosystem - Qt is essentially it's own language at this point! There are reasons to still consider building in C++ and saying "C++ is not a language for the future" feels dogmatic and cargo culty to me. Algol, Cobol and Fortran still have programming communities and while I agree that C++ is outsized in presence for the danger it presents there are still good reasons to choose it for some specific domains - high performance graphical programs being one of those in particular.

C++ has a plethora of foot guns and you need to be aware of them but when you are they're easy to avoid in fact your quote:

Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.

Is probably the thing I agree most with - well built C++ isn't incompatible with regular ol' C++ but it feels like a different language... but as a not too old old-man-developer different projects often feel like different languages - each company/project has tools and libraries they use and it'll cause code written in the same language to read really differently... I'm a functionally oriented programmer with a pretty particular style, my C++, Python, Java, PHP, Node and Rust all look nearly the same except for language specific peculiarities.

So yea, discipline is needed and nobody's default choice should be C++ but if you follow best practices your C++ can be quite safe.

... that all said... I fucking hate the concept of definition files being sseparate from code files so I'm not going to use C++ anytime soon.