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

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (13 children)

I'm going to advocate for C here: the sheer simplicity, fast compile times, and power it gives you means it's not a bad language, even after all these years. Couple that with the fact that everything supports it.

Rust, while I don't actually know how to write it, seems much more difficult to learn, slower to compile, and if you want to do anything with memory, you have to fight the compiler.

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had to deal with the scenario yet but does compile time really matter? I mean for small programs it seems it’s almost instant on modern machines and for large programs I would assume, if it exists, that you would be using the equivalent of make so you would only be recompiling the small changes made.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Compile times are a barrier. How much of hurdle that really is depends on the project and dev. Like readability, accessabilty, friendlyness, license and userbase it all adds up to who can work on the project.

I know in the DevX space the rule of the thumb is you want to have devs see results of a commit before the urge to check their phone/other tabs wins over because that context switching is timly for them.

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