this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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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.

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[–] mlg 23 points 9 months ago (3 children)

You mean like android running java which is why everyone and their mom bought Israel's Pegasus spyware toolkit?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mlg 11 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

The apps are (sometimes) Java, but the OS is a mix of languages, mostly C and C++. The Java runtime itself is C++.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName 4 points 9 months ago

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.