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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] 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What memory-safe systems programming languages are out there, besides Rust?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Here are a few:

https://dlang.org/

https://ziglang.org/

https://odin-lang.org/

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Zig is better than C, but still a far stretch from the memory safety of Rust: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Also Swift!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Languages with GC

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I appreciate your answer, but I mentioned systems programming, because I was more interested in languages that do not rely on a garbage collector.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

To play devil's advocate, most systems programming can be done even with a garbage collector. Midori was a project to build an operating system on a variant of C#, and although the garbage collector did impose technical difficulties, it wasn't a dealbreaker. Go isn't usable everywhere Rust is, but it can in fact be used for many things that previously would have been considered "systems" niches (which is part of why there was a somewhat prevalent misconception in the early days of Rust that they were similar languages). Prominent D developers have defended D's garbage collector (even though it's technically optional). Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, used to express great confidence that C++ would one day have a garbage collector.

...but you're right, Rust and its rise in popularity (and, conversely, the C++ community's resistance to adopt anything with garbage collection) have definitely narrowed the common definition of "systems programming" to exclude anything with a "thick" runtime.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I enjoyed the facts spit above.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Huh, I totally missed that my bad