Prossimo – Memory safety for the Internet's most critical infrastructure

Re:Prossimo – Memory safety for the Internet's most critical... by tptacek on Friday June 18, 2021 @06:31PM (#27555712)

Nobody with influence agrees with this assessment. Without taking the bait on this "C++ software is garbage" stuff: there's general acceptance that some significant chunk of memory-unsafe software, particularly the stuff most exposed to attack, or that runs on the systems we're most concerned with being attacked, needs to be replaced with memory-safe alternatives.

It is simply not the case that Rust's only role is in "new killer apps". Replacing C++ code is part of the raison dêtre of Rust.

You knew this was a pointless dead argument the moment Linus Torvalds began entertaining Rust kernel modules. The debate is over. That doesn't mean --- regardless of what any website says --- that all C++ software is "garbage", or that anyone is going to pry C++ out of your cold, dead hands. But it does make arguing about whether the maintainer of curl should accept funds to replace some of their code with Rust tedious and unproductive.

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Re:Prossimo – Memory safety for the Internet's most critical... by pjmlp on Saturday June 19, 2021 @03:44AM (#27558621)

There is, yet WinUI selling point is that it is written in C++, just like macOS DriverKit and Metal.

I am betting with you how Microsoft will tout the C++ trumpet on the Windows 11 Developer talks next week, despite their timid approach to Rust on some of their tools now.

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Re:Prossimo – Memory safety for the Internet's most critical... by mwcampbell on Saturday June 19, 2021 @03:17PM (#27563510)

> yet WinUI selling point is that it is written in C++

That is probably intended to be a contrast with C# or JavaScript, not Rust.

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Re:Prossimo – Memory safety for the Internet's most critical... by pjmlp on Sunday June 20, 2021 @03:26AM (#27567925)

So the marketing message goes something like this,

Microsoft Security Response Center puts out a guideline that states:

1 - Use .NET languages, Java, Go if you can afford a GC

2 - Adopt Rust otherwise

3 - If C++ must be used, take care and adopt C++ Core Guidelines

WinUI team,

"WinUI is powered by a highly optimized C++ core that delivers blistering performance, long battery life, and responsive interactivity that professional developers demand. Its lower system utilization allows it to run on a wider range of hardware, ensuring your sophisticated workloads run with ease."

https://microsoft.github.io/microsoft-ui-xaml/

I should also note that .NET is migrating their C++ code into C#, as they improved the language to add the features available on Sing# and System C#.

" In this release, we’ve continued, and even accelerated, the process of porting native implementations in the coreclr runtime from C/C++ to instead be normal C# managed code in System.Private.Corelib."

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...

C++ force is too strong on WinDev, the very fact that Windows is the only mainstream OS that still doubles down on a C++ based GUI framework kind of proves it.

I am really curious if Windows 11 will finally be more like Apple and Google platforms, or keep going down this path of making certain APIs only available in C++, while forcing .NET devs to manually wrap them.

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