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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

but I disagree wholly that it’s the language’s fault that people can exploit their programs. I’d say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.

Considering that even the best programmers in the world can't write correct programs with C/C++, it's wrong to absolve those languages of the massive level of memory safety bugs in them. The aforementioned best programmers don't lack the knowledge needed to write correct programs. But programmers are just humans and they make or miss serious bugs that they never intended. Having the computing power to catch such bugs and then not using it is the real mistake here. In fact, I would go one step further and say that it isn't the language's fault either. Such computing power didn't exist when these languages were conceived. Now that it does, the fault lies entirely with the crowd that still insist that there's nothing wrong with these old languages and that these new languages are a fad.