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

submitted 10 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] 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Leaders in Industry Support White House Call to Address Root Cause of Many of the Worst Cyber Attacks

And it's called C/C++. It's gotten so bad that even the friggin' white house has to make a press release about it. Think about it, the place where that majority barely even understand the difference between a file browser and a web browser is telling you to stop using C/C++. Hell, even the creator and maintainers of the language don't know how to make it memory safe. If that isn't a wake up call, then nothing ever will be.

And this isn't the first call! The IEEE also says more clearly: GTFO C/C++.

If you want memory-safe, don't write C/C++. Trying to get that shit memory-safe is a hassle and a half. You're better off learning a language that isn't full of foot-guns, gotchas, and undefined behavior.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

~~If you want memory-safe,~~ don’t write C/C++.

Fixed that for you. There's no situation where you want buffer overruns.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

There's no situation where you want buffer overruns.

I want buffer overruns in my game consoles for jailbreaking purposes lmfaoooooo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If you don't want ~~memory-safe~~ buffer overruns, don’t write C/~~C++~~.

Fixed further?

It's perfectly possible to write C++ code that won't fall prey to buffer overruns. C is a lot harder. However yes it's far from memory safe, you can still do stupid things with pointers and freed memory if you want to.

I'll admit as I grew up with C I still have a love for some of its oh so simple features like structs. For embedded work, give me a packed struct over complex serialization libraries any day.

I tend to write a hybrid of the two languages for my own projects, and I'll be honest I've forgotten where exactly the line lies between them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

You’re better off learning a language that isn’t full of foot-guns, gotchas, and undefined behavior.

As a JS developer, seeing this quote about C/C++ for a change gives me unbelievable levels of schadenfreude