Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by lambdaone on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:42AM
(#50364772)
The U.S. government could have required all new software for any government-procured system to be written memory-safe languages, thus making it ubiquitous. This could have been phased in slowly with a few years of on-ramp time to allow for industry to acquire the relevant skills.
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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by terminalcommand on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:46AM
(#50364807)
But even in memory-safe languages, compiler bugs are still an issue. The theory is perfect but the implementation is flawed. In such case once the compiler bugs are found, the software would have to be rewritten to compile. For example an 11 year old memory bug was discovered recently in the rust compiler: https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/rust-borrow-checker-bug....
Memory safe languages are not a silver bullet either.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by GTP on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:59AM
(#50364938)
Definitely not a silver bullet (consider also that memory management isn'the only source for vulns), but still much better than C/C++.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by dns_snek on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:44PM
(#50369800)
[delayed]
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by terminalcommand on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @03:07PM
(#50370796)
No, you are wrong. Rust compiler bug uncovered this month was aboıt memory safety: https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/rust-borrow-checker-bug....
Basically, the borrow checker allowed writing memory unsafe programs without using the keyword unsafe.
Compilers for C, C++ etc. are well established but Rust is a relatively new language. There are many bugs to come just like this.
Using a memory safe language is not a silver bullet for writing memory safe code. The implementation of the memory safe language introduces bugs as well.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by dns_snek on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @05:42PM
(#50372509)
[delayed]
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by bluGill on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:50AM
(#50364842)
The U.S. government had pushed Ada for years and it never worked out. The government was forced to accept C++ because industry was rebelling against ADA, even though ADA was memory safe. Well, Ada did have the ability to be memory unsafe. It was much better by default.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by jazzypants on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:52AM
(#50379814)
I mean, the government could have just stopped working with those rebellious, incompetent contractors, but I guess the pork barrel was just too enticing.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by elcritch on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:53AM
(#50364870)
The DoD tried that with Ada and largely failed. That was with defense contractors whose primary customer mandated it. That was despite Ada being proven to work in its first projects.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by elzbardico on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @08:14AM
(#50365103)
The DoD have even created their own language: ADA. Massive contracts power, but different markets to incentivize.
The distance between the usual consumer/b2b tech startup and the kind of company that sells software to the air force is even bigger than the distance between Google and the kind of company who hires Accenture.