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White House urges developers to dump C and C++ (www.infoworld.com)

submitted 8 months ago by MarcoPOLO@sh.itjust.works to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 21 points 8 months ago

You mean like android running java which is why everyone and their mom bought Israel's Pegasus spyware toolkit?

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 18 points 8 months ago

When was the last time you've heard of a memory safety issue in Java code? Not the runtime or some native library, raw dogged Java.

Memory safety isn't a silver bullet, but it practically erases an entire category of bugs.

[-] mlg@lemmy.world 11 points 8 months ago

Fair point, even log4j was running java code, not literally hijacking the stack or heap.

That being said, I'm poking fun because C and C++ have low level capabilities of which only Rust offers a complete alternative of. Most of everything else is safe because it comes packaged with a garbage collector which affects performance and viability. I think Go technically counts if you set the GC allocation to 0 and use pointers for everything, but might as well use Rust or C at that point.

I guess I'm just complaining out of all the issues ONCD could point out, they went after the very broad "memeory-safe is always better" when most of the people using C and C++ need the performance. They only offered Rust as a potential alternative in the report with nothing else which everyone already knows. Would be nice to see them make a real statement like telling megacorps to stop using unencrypted SCADA on the internet.

[-] bamboo@lemm.ee 15 points 8 months ago

The apps are (sometimes) Java, but the OS is a mix of languages, mostly C and C++. The Java runtime itself is C++.

[-] a1studmuffin@aussie.zone 4 points 8 months ago

I love that Android chose Java so they could run it on different processor architectures, but in the end one architecture won out so Java wasn't necessary any more. I guess they didn't know at the time, but they'd claw back a tonne of efficiency if they dropped the Java VM.