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.

White House urges developers to dump C and C++::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.

  • Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    9 months ago

    C is not the problem, it’s sloppy “programmers” who cannot handle direct memory control and who do not understand the underlying system architecture and how a microprocessor operates. People who are good at writing C can make code just as safe as the safest Rust code.

    • daddy32@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      It is just too easy to shoot yourself in the foot when using a foot gun… Sure the experts can avoid it, but that doesn’t mean the foot gun is a good tool in general.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      While this is technically correct, it’s tantamount to saying “just don’t make mistakes”, or arguing that a seatbelt is unnecessary because many are good enough drivers to not need it.

      Languages like C and C++ do not prohibit the kinds of mistakes that the NSA told us two years ago lead to software vulnerabilities.

      Other languages, like Rust, have higher guardrails built in and make it much more difficult to accidentally create the same failure modes.