PRESS RELEASE: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe | ONCD | The White House
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Leaders in Industry Support White House Call to Address Root Cause of Many of the Worst Cyber Attacks Read the full report here WASHINGTON – Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface in cyberspace. ONCD makes the…

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?

  • Faresh@lemmy.ml
    211·
    9 months ago

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

      • Faresh@lemmy.ml
        15·
        9 months ago

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

        • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
          271·
          9 months ago

          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.

    • psudo@beehaw.org
      31·
      9 months ago

      Wasn’t Go designed to be a memory safe systems programming language? I haven’t really used it enough to see if it holds true, though.

        • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
          11·
          9 months ago

          Segfaults aren’t particularly dangerous. They mean the problem was caught. The program usually just exits.

          Failing to segfault, thereby allowing a bad memory access, is where the real trouble happens.

      • arendjr@programming.dev
        1·
        9 months ago

        Go is almost memory safe, but it does suffer from an issue with its thick pointers (type + address) that can cause race conditions to misrepresent the type of a data structure. This can lead to true segmentation faults and out of bound memory accesses, though it will probably be quite difficult (but not impossible) to exploit them.