White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe

https://pawb.social/post/7241364

White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe - Pawb.Social

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?

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.

Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that’s much easier on the programmer.

And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible

The most manual way is what C does, which is requiring the programmer to check memory safety by themselves.😛

Also will say that outside of some corner cases, Rust is really not that harder than Java or Python. Even in the relatively rare cases that you run into lifetimes, you can usually clone your data (not ideal for performance usually but hey its what the GC language would often do anyway). And reliability is far better in Rust as well so you save a lot of time debugging. Compiles = it works most of the time.

Software engineer for almost two decades at this point, programming off and on since a kid in the late '80s: Rust is harder. It did seem to get better between versions and maybe it's easier now, but definitely harder than a lot of what I've worked in (which ranges Perl, PHP, C, C++, C#, Java, Groovy/Grails, Rust, js, typescript, various flavors of BASIC, and Go (and probably more I'm forgetting now but didn't work with much; I'm excluding bash/batch, DB stored procedures (though I worked on a billing system written almost entirely in them), etc.)