It has nothing to do with C style coding. The worst offenders are the latest and greatest features, as described brilliantly in this very thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290030

I would argue that the closer you stay to C while using the good features of C++, the safer the code is.

And obviously well written and debugged C code is nearly always more robust than C++ code. But for ideological reasons most people here are unable to acknowledge that, perhaps because they cannot do it.

Quite on the contrary, the worst offenders are:

- implicit conversions

- decays from enums to integers

- implicit conversiosn from integers to unexisting enums

- no bounds checking

- implicit conversions between pointers and arrays

- no proper way to ensure a given array length is valid as part of a function parameter

- null terminated strings, that occasionally aren't terminated

- abusing null terminated strings with clever algorithms, e.g. strtok()

- the preprocessor

- const that isn't really const

- variable arguments that require getting the macro type arguments

- UB explored to the last possibility of code optimization

- no safe way to deal with output parameters

- typedef don't introduce strong typing

All of that came from C, not C++.

> implicit conversions

Manageable in C. Integer conversions are only a tiny fraction of all the other implicitness in C++.

> decays from enums to integers

Compiler warns. Recent real compilers like gcc even have exhaustiveness checks like OCaml.

> implicit conversions from integers to unexisting enums.

Compiler warns.

- no bounds checking

Reason about that and implement your own scheme. Or prove.

> implicit conversions between pointers and arrays

Have not seen a single bug due to that in more than 1000000 lines of C.

> null terminated strings, that occasionally aren't terminated

Have not seen a bug due to that, this is the canonical example of an overblown hypothetical threat.

> abusing null terminated strings with clever algorithms, e.g. strtok()

Prove the algorithm or don't use it. Hint: As far as proofs are concerned, NUL terminated strings are like Lisp lists terminated with NIL, hence a well-founded data structure that is easily amenable to proofs (unlike C++ constructs).

- the preprocessor

Rarely introduces anything and is still required for C++, especially in sane test suites.

I don't think all that came from C, things like typedef being an alias rather than a separate type seem much older.

You are again just throwing dirt at C, mocking all people who write actually robust buzzword free software.

You are ignoring that C code is much easier for formal proofs that C++ code (the kind that you advocate).

You are ignoring 32 years of proven C exploits since Morris worm introduced in 1988, UNIX kernel exploits, including those that Linux collects every year, which lead to Microsoft (Azure Sphere), Google (Android 11), Apple (iPhone X) and Oracle (Solaris SPARC) enforcing hardware memory tagging.

Which happen to be written in C with several layers of code review and static analysis.

So by your reasoning those 32 years have not happened, in spite of being so easy to prevent exploits in C code.

Yeah, right.

Oh, poor Microsoft is forced to use bad bad C-Linux on their Interweb service!

All while their own industrial strength C++-OS (according to you) never has any exploits.

The fact that you are singling out Linux shows that you are only interested in throwing dirt.

Are you joking? Both C and C++ are equally littered with unsafe "features".

I can give you as many UNIX security exploit examples as you feel like having, no need to single out Linux.

It is not about UNIX vs. Linux, it is about the fact that you are always protecting Microsoft, like just now.

I wonder why.

Someone woke up in the 90's it seems.

Here is a little tip for you, Microsoft has been acknowledging security issues with C and C++ since the XP SP2 days.

Which is why Windows happens to have plenty of mitigations that only recently FOSS UNIX clones are catching up to.

Yet they have come public that hasn't been enough, hence the migration effort away from C, enforcing programming guidelines with C++ and coming up with plans to migrate to safer systems programming languages.

Guess which OS vendor is now having first party support for writing GUIs in Rust?

But I can also rephrase what Oracle, Apple and Google have stated in the same vein regarding OS security.

Or maybe you prefer the statements of an UNIX hero instead?

> It only works when everyone plays balls and doesn't do C style coding, ever.

If that’s the problem, and solving that would solve all of C++s memory-issues, why have no-one made a compiler option to simply make that code illegal? A -EUNSAFE or whatever?

Because what got C++ adopted in first place was its copy-paste compatibility with C.

C++ was also born at Bell Labs, and due to that, all major C compiler vendors quickly started shipping C++ on their boxes as well.

If you take away copy-paste compatibility you might be better off doing D, C# or whatever safe variant already exists.

Which is what many of us have done, to move to type safe languages, and only use C and C++ at the boundaries, in small pockets of unsafe code.

In fact if you look at mobile OSes, that is the reality for app developers, C and C++ are no longer the full stack languages they were 20 years ago, rather used for the kernel, drivers, compositor and shading languages, but everything else happens in safer languages.

And the SDKs only allow you to write libraries, not full applications.

Naturally are clever developers that subvert the workflow and transform the libraries into the actual application.

Because this would refuse to compile 100% of real-world C++ code, so nobody would use it.

One problem is that C++ can directly include C headers of the operating system, while languages that aren't copy-paste compatible with C have to create some kind of wrapper library for them... this is a major reason for the success of C++, but it also makes improvements of this kind far harder to deploy in practice.

> Because this would refuse to compile 100% of real-world C++ code, so nobody would use it.

So if anyone is claiming you could write real-world safe C++ if you wanted to, they are making a false claim then?

I think you'd have to do the same thing that you'd do in non-C++ languages: write an abstraction layer that encapsulates the low-level OS access (or hardware access, in embedded software) and whose implementation is unsafe, but whose interface is "safe", whatever that means.

Once you have that to build on top of, such a compiler flag could make sense... if it were possible in C++, which I'm not sure about.

See for example this criticism of one such effort: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/06/safe-c-subset-is-vapour...

So in about half a decade the C++ camp has made no improvements wrt to tooling and statically verified safe code, it’s been all talk and no show. And in the meantime Rust has improved massively.

It’s obviously still too early to declare a winner, but to me this sounds like a turtle slowly but surely overtaking a rabbit.

Because you would make many proven algorithms from Knuth or CLRS illegal.

This is never acknowledged by the C++ people: Idiomatic C++ is not suitable for formal proofs, if you don't believe me, ask Xavier Leroy.