C++ creator rebuts White House warning
C++ creator rebuts White House warning
Biden administration seems oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees, Bjarne Stroustrup said.
Python is memory safe? Can't you access/address memory with C bindings?
Python is memory safe? Can't you access/address memory with C bindings?
You can do that in basically any language. Rust even has the ability to break out of its safeguards and write unsafe Rust code.
"Memory safety" in this context is more about the defaults and how easy it is to write unsafe code accidentally.
Mr Stroustrup can spin it however he likes, but 70% of CVEs are caused by memory errors in unsafe languages like C and C++. That isn't happening because the majority of their devs are idiots. The language is the problem.
Talking about "but there are tools" and "hold on a minute, there a ways to write safe C++" is missing. It's way too easy to write memory unsafe code in C++. The opposite is true of other languages and that's why they are being recommended (dare I say pushed) over C++. To write memory unsafe Rust for example, you really, really have to want to.
C++ is his baby, Of course he won't acknowledge it and it was entirely predictable he would blame the programmers. The language will be the equivalent of COBOL in a decade or two.
$100 says his response boils down to "just don't write unsafe code"
Edit: It did. He also said C++ is working to implement optional safety features, but tl;dr:
Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines
And the modern guidelines are mostly an unenforced list of things not to do.
I'm not a Rust developer (yet), but I understand its strength in this regard as: Rust is statically memory safe by default, and code which isn't statically memory safe must be declared with the unsafe keyword. Whereas C++ has not deprecated C-style pointers, and so a C engineer can easily write unsafe C code that's valid in a C++ compiler, and no declaration of its unsafeness is readily apparent to trigger an audit.
It's nice and all that C++ pioneered a fair number of memory safety techniques like SBRM, but the debate now is about safety by default, not optional bolt-on safety. All agree that the overall process to achieve correct code is paramount, not just the language constructs.
Why wait and hope for C++ to get where modern languages are now? I know there's value in the shared experience in C++ that if adapted would make it stronger, but I can only see a development of C++ having to force a drop of a lot of outdated stuff to even get started on being more suitable.
But the language is just not comfortable to me. From large amounts of anything creating undefined behavior, the god awful header files which I hate with a passion, tough error messages and such. I also met a fun collision of C++ in Visual Studio and using it with CMake in CLion.
I've just started looking at rust for fun, and outside not understanding all the errors messages with the bounded stuff yet, figuring out what type of string I should use or pass, and the slow climb up the skill curve, it's pretty nice. Installing stuff is as easy as copy pasting the name into the cargo file!
Rust is just the prospective replacement of C++ though, people act like the White house said that C++ should be replaced by rust now. But the just recommend it and other languages, C# will do for a lot of people that does not need the performance and detail that the aforementioned languages target. Python is targeting a whole different use, but often combined with the faster ones.
C++ will live a long time, and if the popularity dies down it will surely be very profitable to be a developer on the critical systems that use it many years from now. I just don't think an evolution of C++ is going to bring what the world needs, particularly because of the large amount of existing memory related security vulnerabilities. If things were good as they are now, this recommendation would not be made to begin with.
I'd love to see Bjarne Stroustrup being grilled by Congress about this, and have to explain shared pointers and reference counting to the same people who didn't understand how Facebook made money.
The Rust lobby has reached the white house. In other news...
Kinda sad how that guy destroys his reputation so late in his life. I mean he actually contributed a lot to the field of software development, but just refuses to accept that C++ days are thankfully over. The language has grown into a complete abomination, but all the experience we gained during its long history (good and bad) are extremely valuable for designing new languages from now on. One can't rescue a design by just adding things to it (regardless of the kind of design), that's just a simple truth. Thus, a backwards compatible C++ can never become even half as good as rust is already today (and there's of course always room for improvement). But that's not because bjarne did something stupid, but because humanity as a whole didn't know better back than. He could just accept that, embrace new technology, retire in dignity, be remembered as highly admired and appreciated. Instead he acts like a butthurt idiot, trying to defend that cars shouldn't have seatbelts, because if everyone drives carefully, nothing bad will happen anyway. Pathetic.
Look, there's a thing called safety-catch and that's why my son can play with semi-auto rifles.
Oh boy, the Biden admistration is in their nerdy programming language phase. I'm scared for when the administration gets into WM vs DE and warns about the bloat of not using suckless software.