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C++ creator rebuts White House warning

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Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#11

Post by alphabeta567 »

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,…

Right, tell me you've never made an off by one error.

Or had a dangling reference in your program.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#12

Post by kstrauser »

alphabeta567 wrote: post #10
Shawnecy wrote: post #8

About a year ago, Stroustrup wrote a similar response[0] to a similar statement from the NSA[1]. I wasn't really convinced and am more in agreement with this response to Stroustrup[2] from an embedded Linux developer. To quote from near the end of their response to Stroustrup: > In the meantime, it is unfair for Dr. Stroustrup to call safe programming languages novelties or to pretend that C++ isn’t already far behin…

> I'm not really buying that C++ is really all that commonly safe when we have states like these[3]: It's not. At this point, I cannot in good faith say that he is not lying, either to us or himself.

I don't think he's lying to us. I think he genuinely believes that everyone is using it wrong.

Although that's not much of a defense when he was the one who invented the wrong ways to use it.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#13

Post by kstrauser »

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,…

> 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?

Yes. Experimentally, that is absolutely correct. New programmers are bad at memory management. So are old ones. So are experts, unless you seriously want to argue that the OpenBSD gang are a bunch of amateurs.

The best C/C++ programmers in the world still write code with memory flaws today. At some point you have to say, you know, maybe it's not the programmers that are the problem.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#14

Post by pornel »

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,…

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 the system that is broken, and needs to be made more robust.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#15

Post by bobba27 »

Shawnecy wrote: post #8

About a year ago, Stroustrup wrote a similar response[0] to a similar statement from the NSA[1]. I wasn't really convinced and am more in agreement with this response to Stroustrup[2] from an embedded Linux developer. To quote from near the end of their response to Stroustrup: > In the meantime, it is unfair for Dr. Stroustrup to call safe programming languages novelties or to pretend that C++ isn’t already far behin…

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 general a good thing to steer people away from C / C++ due to the languanges being very hard to use correctly.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#16

Post by ttfkam »

kstrauser wrote: post #12
alphabeta567 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not really buying that C++ is really all that commonly safe when we have states like these[3]: It's not. At this point, I cannot in good faith say that he is not lying, either to us or himself.

I don't think he's lying to us. I think he genuinely believes that everyone is using it wrong. Although that's not much of a defense when he was the one who invented the wrong ways to use it.

It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary (or hobby or self-image) depends on his not understanding it.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#18

Post by techbrovanguard »

bobba27 wrote: post #15
Shawnecy wrote: post #8

About a year ago, Stroustrup wrote a similar response[0] to a similar statement from the NSA[1]. I wasn't really convinced and am more in agreement with this response to Stroustrup[2] from an embedded Linux developer. To quote from near the end of their response to Stroustrup: > In the meantime, it is unfair for Dr. Stroustrup to call safe programming languages novelties or to pretend that C++ isn’t already far behin…

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…

> It would have stopped virtually all of them?

Do you have a source for that claim?

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#19

Post by zenbowman »

I understand wanting to defend your baby, and I think C++ was VASTLY better than most other languages for performance sensitive code until maybe 5 years ago - but the combination of memory safety and thread safety that Rust offers means that there are very few situations where C++ is the appropriate choice for a new project now.

I have written professionally in C++ for 20 years now, and I would pick Rust for a _new_ project/fresh codebase in a heartbeat. tokio alone is so vastly superior to anything you can do in async C++ that it makes zero sense to select C++ for a _new_ project (obviously if you have an existing codebase the price of interop may not be worth it).

Bjarne is being deliberately obtuse here.

Re: C++ creator rebuts White House warning

#20

Post by zenbowman »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #6

Stroustrup 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 would argue that it made sense for performance-sensitive code until the maturation of Rust, so it made sense even in 2015. But not today.
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