Programming

17398 readers

144 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

267

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

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

138 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 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 8 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.