Biden administration seems oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees, Bjarne Stroustrup said.

Python is memory safe? Can’t you access/address memory with C bindings?

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
    249·
    8 months ago

    C++ is leagues above C in this regard. He’s rightly upset that they’re lumping the two together.

    Bjarne’s work for safety profiles could indeed manifest in a solution that guarantees memory safety; time will tell. C++ is a moving target.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      196·
      8 months ago

      C++ is leagues above C in this regard.

      It’s really not. It has the same flaws, some libraries that promise to avoid them (as long as you don’t hold them wrong - what every single programmer does), and lots and lots of new flaws that may come from anywhere.

      • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
        52·
        8 months ago

        I use C, C++ and Rust in my dayjob.

        I don’t like C++, but I disagree with your statement.

        C++ has:

        • a string type, which sidesteps error prone buffer juggling.
        • smart pointers for scope based deallocation.
        • generic data types. No more hand rolling list and mapping types with void *.

        It’s obviously still not a fully memory safe language, but it has some perks over C. I’d still much rather be using rust (most of the time).

    • Tobias Hunger@programming.dev
      123·
      8 months ago

      That depends on how you decide which bucket something gets thrown into.

      The C++ community values things like the RAII and other features that developers can use to prevent classes of bugs. When that is you yard-stick, then C and C++ are not in one bucket.

      These papers are about memory safety guarantees and not much else. C and C++ are firmly in the same bucket according to this metric. So they get grouped together in these papers.