C++ creator rebuts White House warning
infoworld.com
C++ creator rebuts White House warning
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Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#2This link is a mobile (AMP) version of the article that has been submitted already:
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#3> Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples’ notions of which aspects of safety are important differ.
The fundamental problem is they’re just guidelines and they’ll always be just guidelines. You can still do all the wild old stuff without so much as a warning and you’ll have to figure out how it even interacts with the new stuff which exposes yet another vector for failure.
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#4Stroustrup as always fails to recognize the vast surface area of C++ features, foot cannons, and the heavy weight of C compatibility around C++ neck.
C++ barely made sense in 1995. It makes absolutely no sense today.
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#5> Improving safety has been an aim of C++ from day one and throughout its evolution. Just compare the K&R C language with the earliest C++, and the early C++ with contemporary C++. My CppCon 2023 keynote outlines that evolution,
C++ safety may have improved a lot, but it’s still far, far behind most other languages we use. It’s not even a close comparison.
You throw a bunch of programmers at a problem and you will get some number of bugs in the code. In C++, some percentage of those bugs will be memory errors. You can eliminate raw pointers but that doesn’t solve the problem—there are all sorts of places that dangling pointers crop up anyways, like in references that get captured in lambdas which get stored somewhere and then the programmer doesn’t realize that the lambda is called after the object is destroyed.
I’ve seen various solutions proposed to these problems. The worst solution is to “just hire better programmers and be careful”. The easiest solution for greenfield projects, most of the time, is to pick a different language.
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#6[deleted]
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#7There's the language as idealized, and the language as used. Stroustrup is clearly brilliant, but he's talking about the former while everyone else means the latter. If you started a brand new C++ project today, using only the modern, safe ways of doing things and including only dependencies that do the same, OK, fine. That's, what, 0.1% of C++ projects? The rest of them use a soup of features and misfeatures that've been released in the spirit of trying to make everyone happy simultaneously.
I am solidly in the camp that believes C++ is unsafe. With enough discipline and tooling, it is possible to write safe C++. Are there more than a sliver of shops jumping through those hoops?
Of course, there may be a survivorship bias involved that proves me wrong. If it turned out that every remaining C++ shop is great at writing C++ code, because all the shops that weren't gave up and migrated to something else, I wouldn't be shocked.
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#8Yeah. The language you pick doesn't magically make you Fort Knox regardless of "memory safety". Rewind in time and the White House would be berating all of us to write in Java... you know... a "memory safe" language, only for the worst security fail to come along Log4Shell.
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#9Stroustrup as always fails to recognize the vast surface area of C++ features, foot cannons, and the heavy weight of C compatibility around C++ neck. C++ barely made sense in 1995. It makes absolutely no sense today.
I think the funny thing is you no longer even get peak performance from C++. In many ways Java is running rings around C++ performance. Partly, it's because you get state-of-the-art peak optimizations for free from Java, and you'll need a team of 20 full-time build engineers to get a peak C++ artifact with PGO, LTO, and post-link optimizations. Partly it's because the speed of C++ is illusory, with the superficial success coming at the start of a project, followed by years of monotonic performance degradation as the flaws in the original are iteratively discovered and remediated. We see this very clearly with gRPC, where the performance of the C++ implementation has been cut in half over the last 3 years while the Java implementation, which is faster today than ever before, is the performance champion.
Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning
#10> Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples’ notions of which aspects of safety are important differ. I and the C++ standard committee are trying to deal with that
If only people were perfect, then things would be perfect.
There’s, what, 40 years of evidence to suggest that most people, most of the time, simply cannot write memory-safe C++ code (50 years if you count C.)
Maybe we should continue the experiment for another 50 years, just to be really sure the language is the problem.