Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.
Pretty crazy to reccomend Java as a secure alternative.
Why? What’s wrong with safe, managed and fast languages?
Nothing really, the JVM has a pretty troubled history that would really make me hesitate to call it “safe”. It was originally built before anyone gave much thought to security and that fact plauges it to the present day.
and how much of this troubled history is linked to Java Applets/native browsers extensions, and how much of it is relevant today?
Java’s runtime has had a large number of CVEs in the last few years, so that’s probably a decent reason to be concerned.
Yep but:
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it’s one runtime, so patching a CVE patches it for all programs (vs patching each and every program individually)
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graalvm is taking care of enabling java to run on java
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Written in C++
There’s a difference between writing code on a well-tested and broadly used platform implemented in C++ vs. writing new C++.
Nothing…
Only that descrition doesn’t include Java
Shut up Brandon, you can’t even code. This is just propaganda from Big Rust.
I wanted you to know that I laughed and enjoyed this comment, ignore the haters 💛
Also like it’s the only source of vulnerabilities… in addition a lot of the trendy python libs are developed in C; do we also ditch those?
It is one of the main sources. Like, actually a very substantial fraction is memory related. I think It was more than 50%, granted those are estimates.
You mean like android running java which is why everyone and their mom bought Israel’s Pegasus spyware toolkit?
The apps are (sometimes) Java, but the OS is a mix of languages, mostly C and C++. The Java runtime itself is C++.
When was the last time you’ve heard of a memory safety issue in Java code? Not the runtime or some native library, raw dogged Java.
Memory safety isn’t a silver bullet, but it practically erases an entire category of bugs.
Fair point, even log4j was running java code, not literally hijacking the stack or heap.
That being said, I’m poking fun because C and C++ have low level capabilities of which only Rust offers a complete alternative of. Most of everything else is safe because it comes packaged with a garbage collector which affects performance and viability. I think Go technically counts if you set the GC allocation to 0 and use pointers for everything, but might as well use Rust or C at that point.
I guess I’m just complaining out of all the issues ONCD could point out, they went after the very broad “memeory-safe is always better” when most of the people using C and C++ need the performance. They only offered Rust as a potential alternative in the report with nothing else which everyone already knows. Would be nice to see them make a real statement like telling megacorps to stop using unencrypted SCADA on the internet.
I love that Android chose Java so they could run it on different processor architectures, but in the end one architecture won out so Java wasn’t necessary any more. I guess they didn’t know at the time, but they’d claw back a tonne of efficiency if they dropped the Java VM.
Java also made it very accessible to the vast majority of existing Java developers.
Way more Java developers than Objective C developers at the time.
I wasn’t a fan of learning Objective C when I started learning just as swift was coming out but too new to use.
Is that nottheonion?
Yep! A group of people hand picked by a guy born when the Turing Machine was considered exciting new tech is EXACTLY who to listen to about software development!
Meanwhile the report does not really single out C/C++
Thats because in government products many unsafe languages shittier than C(++) are used, like Ada, Fortran, and Cobol. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of the code running on products for government use werent written in C or C++
What are you talking about? Did you read the report? On page 7 They directly say that C/C++ “lack traits associated with memory safety”.
People are talking about Java, but the majority of programming languages are memory safe nowadays. Go satisfies this requirement, for example.
Rewrite it in Rust
That’s probably a good idea but I can see some proper longevity issues in that one
As you wish. Time to start learning D and D++
Hey girl, would you like my D or D++?
Guys, C++ is gonna be dead in a couple of years now. Remember this comment…
…and read it again in ten years.
Are you the guy who has been posting this same comment every 10 years over the last half century?
(Edit: is joke)
Nice. Now I’m waiting for all the Rust or whatever “safe” languages environments for embedded systems to fall from the sky. And please some that actually work on small processors with little memories.
When all the talented programmers are all gay communists and your entire state exists to murder gay communists. Still can’t forget how Allen Turing, a gay man whose inventions were a gigantic help in winning WW2, KYS’d because they still treated him like garbage even after the fact.
Biden administration has fallen into the Rewrite it in Rust agenda.
