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The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

nsa.gov

141–150 of 427 posts

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada people scratching their heads....

How many of them are left? I thought it was very much a dead language

There are still plenty of Ada devs around, but they're almost all in the DoD or working for defense contractors.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People figured out how to build buildings prior to creating building codes

And many buildings were built deliberately poorly to make a quick buck - or caught fire too easily or fell down in minor earthquakes (or worse damage other property/people). Peoples homes are a major financial commitment and can ruin people if they're not up to scratch. The regulations are to ensure the 10% of bad builders/developers don't ruin peoples lives.

And yet, poorly build buildings are still being build, but at least now it is much harder and much more expensive for a person to build their own house, and for a small construction companies to compete with giant monopolies. Yay!

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy... Nothing is mandated here. These are just suggestions from experts. Don't take them if you don't want to.

wait for gov contract projects mandate them in the fine prints, it's a signal that is serious enough for anyone interested in doing any software-related business with gov, for them, this is nearly the same as 'mandated'

That’s just a customer with requirements.. like all customers.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#144
post #32

I advise training programmers instead of throwing them in front of a screen without any training. Companies these days provides no training at all. When I was hired over 40 years ago, I spent plenty of time being trained for my first 3 months. Now, nothing, and you if you want to train a new person, you do it on your own time.

Not to worry! In the future most programmers will undergo tens of thousands of GPU hours of training.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#145
post #32

I advise training programmers instead of throwing them in front of a screen without any training. Companies these days provides no training at all. When I was hired over 40 years ago, I spent plenty of time being trained for my first 3 months. Now, nothing, and you if you want to train a new person, you do it on your own time.

I feel like each company/organization has such a unique DevOps toolset that all the "training" goes into figuring out which IDE you're allowed to use, which git client to install, what even are the processes/policies for installing stuff on your work computer, what's the workflow, etc etc etc. All the bandwidth is used on that and there's not much left over for the actual art of coding.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Really, the only memory unsafe languages still in use are C and C++. Ada, Fortran, assembly?

Fortran doesn’t even have dynamic memory allocation, so it’s inherently safe.

It actually has had this since Fortran-90, and there's even a 'pointer' keyword.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#147
post #32

I advise training programmers instead of throwing them in front of a screen without any training. Companies these days provides no training at all. When I was hired over 40 years ago, I spent plenty of time being trained for my first 3 months. Now, nothing, and you if you want to train a new person, you do it on your own time.

I think people should take responsibility for their own awesomeness.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#149
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenting bc I had the same question. My impression of historical Python is that is an old, partially arcane language that due to D.S/AI is now popular; I would initially think it would be no better than those other interpreted. Python does these things well... mainly due to pandas/dataframes/polars.

Language wise, Python is basically just Perl with its arms cut off and bunch of makeup added. It's just very popular in the scientific community, so they have to add it.

Python does not have a lot in common with Perl language-wise, so this seems an odd statement.

Re: The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps

#150
post #6

Their "Appendix: Memory Safe Languages" lists: C#, Go, Java, Python, Rust & Swift

It's unfortunate that there's no mention that not all these languages are equally safe. Go isn't memory safe when using goroutines. See: Golang data races to break memory safety: https://blog.stalkr.net/2015/04/golang-data-races-to-break-m...

Adding some more for other languages:

* many GC'd languages like Go, C#, Java make it harder to leak memory, while languages where reference counting is more prevalent (Python, Rust) it can be easier to leak memory due to circular references.

* Languages with VMs like C#/Java/Python may be easier to sandbox or execute securely, but since native code is often called into it breaks the sandboxing nature.

* Formally-verified C code (like what aerospace manufacturers write) is safer than e.g. Rust.

* For maximum safety, sandboxing becomes important - so WASM begins to look appealing for non-safety-critical systems (like aerospace) as it allows for applying memory/CPU constraints too in addition to restricting all system access.

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