PRESS RELEASE: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe | ONCD | The White House
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Leaders in Industry Support White House Call to Address Root Cause of Many of the Worst Cyber Attacks Read the full report here WASHINGTON – Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface in cyberspace. ONCD makes the…

On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

  •  Adanisi   ( @Adanisi@lemmy.zip ) English
    8•4 months ago

    I’m going to advocate for C here: the sheer simplicity, fast compile times, and power it gives you means it’s not a bad language, even after all these years. Couple that with the fact that everything supports it.

    Rust, while I don’t actually know how to write it, seems much more difficult to learn, slower to compile, and if you want to do anything with memory, you have to fight the compiler.

    And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

    •  lolcatnip   ( @lolcatnip@reddthat.com ) English
      6•4 months ago

      I’ve written quite a bit of Rust and a lot of C and C++ code. I’ll take Rust over C or C++ for any task, including ones where memory safety isn’t a concern. Yes, there’s a learning curve, but overall it’s just more pleasant to use. Now that I’m used to it, writing C++ code feels just as much like fighting the compiler as Rust ever did.

    •  crimsonpoodle   ( @crimsonpoodle@pawb.social ) OP
      2•4 months ago

      Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had to deal with the scenario yet but does compile time really matter? I mean for small programs it seems it’s almost instant on modern machines and for large programs I would assume, if it exists, that you would be using the equivalent of make so you would only be recompiling the small changes made.