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C++ creator rebuts White House warning

infoworld.com

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Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#51

Post by orf »

72deluxe wrote: post #50
orf wrote: post #4

> Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines AKA, we’ve created a messy monster that’s out of our control, please don’t blame us.

But it seems like blaming the inventor of knives for using them dangerously? Knives are really useful for cutting things. The same goes for cars. Thousands of people have died in car accidents yet nobody is proposing that we replace cars because if you use them correctly they really are quite useful. The same goes for C++. I see a lot of C++-bashing on this thread (it seems very popular on HN?) but it is a useful lan…

Sure, but it’s more like someone invented and sold a car then strapped a bunch of knives to it.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#52

Post by pjmlp »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #41
junon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I feel like I wrote safer C code because at least I fully understood the behavior of the few standard library functions I used - both the good and the bad. C++ always had that question mark of if you were fully understanding all of the invariants the library placed on you to uphold. That being said, I've fallen in love with Rust and have no intention of ever going back to C or C++.

I have a big gripe with rust and other modern languages like zig, and it’s difficult to reconcile it. The gripe is that after using them for a while, anything else like java, python, c++ or C is underwhelming, boring and tedious, an exercise in how long you can uphold standards until you fall back to language defaults.

What these languages show, is something anyone used to compiled BASIC, Pascal dialects like Object Pascal, Modula-2 and such, already knew back in the day.

We had languages that were a pleasure to use for high level programming abstractions, while at the same time, provided the necessary features to go all the way down, even inline Assembly if it must be.

Without the culture that tooling much be hard, rather developers are users as well.

Thankfully a new generation of developers is bringing this culture back.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#53

Post by pjmlp »

duped wrote: post #36
bobba27 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C and C++ are HARD to use correctly, but how many of those 60-70% vulnerabilities would have been resolved by just compiling with llvm address sanitizer? It would have stopped virtually all of them? https://llvm.org/pubs/2006-05-24-SAFECode-BoundsCheck.pdf https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html In many cases we already have the tools. The problem is that people are not using them. That said it is still in…

> In many cases we already have the tools. The problem is that people are not using them. The problem with these tools are that the instrumentation code inserted by the compiler comes with a 50-100% program-wide performance loss (*) and that's not acceptable to C++ developers. So in practice, you don't just add -fsanitize=address to your builds, you add it to test builds and fuzz them. But now you're not just trustin…

To developers that cargo cult performance, that is.

I have always enabled bounds checking, and never ever, did it matter for the kind of projects I was involved with.

Not everyone is really writing a VR engine for a console rendering at 120 FPS, but just like everyone wants to be Google, so do much of those developers.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#54

Post by pjmlp »

ttfkam wrote: post #17
biomcgary wrote: post #5

Maybe they need to fork a version of C++ that doesn't have all the dangerous features and forces developers to write only safe C++. It could be called C++--.

…or called Carbon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(programming_language)

Carbon is still a research project, the authors are the first to state to use Rust if one doesn't need to migrate existing C++ code.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#55

Post by pornel »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #49
pornel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been trying the "just don't write bugs" strategy for over 40 years now, and it's not working. Framing this as a problem with people being too stupid is a completely unproductive mix of hubris and elitism. In the disciplines where real safety is required (like engineering, aviation, medicine), it's accepted that people will make mistakes. When a system can fail catastrophically due to a simple human error, it's…

See log4j vulnerability, you still need "just don't write bugs" with safe languages. What was really tried was "use C the hard way", which fails regularly as one can expect. Projects that use C the easy way have much better safety.

See ShellShock. Having memory safety vulnerabilities doesn't prevent other bugs. C and C++ projects still have logic errors, broken auth, XSS, SQL injection, and do dangerously dumb stuff, and that's on top of buffer overflows, user-after-frees, data races, and UB footguns.

Nobody promises that memory safety will fix all bugs, but it can prevent or significantly reduce a class of vulnerabilities, and reduce the total number of serious defects. And then time and effort saved on dealing with memory corruption bugs can be redirected towards dealing with all the other higher-level issues.

> Projects that use C the easy way have much better safety.

That's just another way of blaming programmers for not writing C without the bugs.

Every language can be perfectly safe if used correctly — even hand-written machine code. The problem is that it's easy to say "use C the easy way" (whatever that means), but actual real-world uses don't live up to such standard, and even the best programmers can make mistakes. Language safety is about making programs safer even when programmers write less-than-ideal code.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#56

Post by PartiallyTyped »

pjmlp wrote: post #52
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a big gripe with rust and other modern languages like zig, and it’s difficult to reconcile it. The gripe is that after using them for a while, anything else like java, python, c++ or C is underwhelming, boring and tedious, an exercise in how long you can uphold standards until you fall back to language defaults.

What these languages show, is something anyone used to compiled BASIC, Pascal dialects like Object Pascal, Modula-2 and such, already knew back in the day. We had languages that were a pleasure to use for high level programming abstractions, while at the same time, provided the necessary features to go all the way down, even inline Assembly if it must be. Without the culture that tooling much be hard, rather develope…

> Without the culture that tooling much be hard, rather developers are users as well.

I don't follow this. Could you elaborate?

I think the current culture is that tooling must be smart, accessible, and very well written, e.g rust (cargo, rustc, clippy, rust-analyzer), go coming with everything, same for gleam. Even zig is a better build system for C programs than most buildsystems for C.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#57

Post by gigel82 »

dralley wrote: post #34
gigel82 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say people are too stupid. On the contrary, we onboard fresh grads onto our large C++ code base every once in a while and they all seem to grasp the concepts just fine. I'm wondering if most folks throwing shade at C++ had used pre-C++11 toolsets and just have bad memories of the experience. FWIW, I find modern C++ genuinely great to read / easy to parse by humans (same for similar languages like C#, Java, J…

IME this is mostly a familiarity problem not an actual syntax problem.

No, I mean humans in general, not software developers. Seriously, show a non-developer a printout of some average modern C++ code and some average rust code and see which one they think is easier to read and more visually pleasing.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#58

Post by gigel82 »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #23
gigel82 wrote: post #9

I agree; you can write perfectly safe and noncompromisingly performant code in C++ much better than any language today. It's genuinely difficult to understand why Rust gets rammed down everyone's throats lately; do they really think developers coming out of universities today are too stupid to grasp memory management? If that's the case, why not have everyone code in Scratch? That memo reads like "to avoid wet pants,…

name one piece of open source software in C or C++ with more than a couple thousand commits that has not had to fix a memory safety bug.

There are millions of pieces of software in C or C++ with more than a couple thousand commits, whereas with rust there are maybe a handful (the rust compiler itself, Servo, Deno, and... ?), and I bet they all had to fix memory safety bugs (except I guess we call them "soundness issues" in Rust).

This argument reads like the old "Linux / macOS is safer than Windows, look at all the malware that targets Windows" while ignoring that at the time Windows had 95%+ market share for desktop.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#59

Post by pjmlp »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #56
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What these languages show, is something anyone used to compiled BASIC, Pascal dialects like Object Pascal, Modula-2 and such, already knew back in the day. We had languages that were a pleasure to use for high level programming abstractions, while at the same time, provided the necessary features to go all the way down, even inline Assembly if it must be. Without the culture that tooling much be hard, rather develope…

> Without the culture that tooling much be hard, rather developers are users as well. I don't follow this. Could you elaborate? I think the current culture is that tooling must be smart, accessible, and very well written, e.g rust (cargo, rustc, clippy, rust-analyzer), go coming with everything, same for gleam. Even zig is a better build system for C programs than most buildsystems for C.

I am talking about the C tooling culture, specially when comparing how compilers, linkers and makefiles are exposed, versus the Xerox PARC programming model that was largely adopted by other ecosystems.

Think TP, Delphi, VB, .NET, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Clipper, Eiffel, MacOS AppToolbox, Java,...

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#60

Post by dralley »

gigel82 wrote: post #57
dralley wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME this is mostly a familiarity problem not an actual syntax problem.

No, I mean humans in general, not software developers. Seriously, show a non-developer a printout of some average modern C++ code and some average rust code and see which one they think is easier to read and more visually pleasing.

Average Rust code uses a fair number of lambdas, you won't convince me that C++ has a readable / ergonomic syntax for lambdas.
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