Conversation

William Saar
@saarw
Replying to
@saarw
and
@lemire
Sure, danger of sharp knife/memory-unsafe code decreases as code base matures, but... Google's Chrome team aren't there yet twitter.com/newsycombinato Neither is SSH twitter.com/TheHackersNews Even when safeguards catch problems, it's easy to mess up the fix
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Tavis Ormandy
@taviso
This was interesting, a minor bug report from a fuzzer was fixed incorrectly leading to a far more serious bug that the fuzzer never found. I don't know what the lesson is, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /cc @hanno twitter.com/ProjectZeroBug…
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Daniel Lemire
@lemire
Replying to
@saarw
There will always be bugs in software and hardware. This being said, our civilization is litterally built on C/C++ systems (Linux, Windows, Databases, iOS, Android) from people who deal with very sharp knives. Much of our crypto infrastructure is written in assembly.
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William Saar
@saarw
Replying to
@lemire
That infrastructure will always collapse and that much of it is old is no excuse for not following modern construction norms, question is if SW can self-regulate or regulators need to step in. Some low-level primitives will always exist, asm in crypto to prevent timing attacks...
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Travis Downs
@trav_downs
Replying to
@lemire
@saarw
and 3 others
Assuming one language does take the throne from C/C++, even the ultimate winner may have a significantly smaller niche than C/C++ ever had - for a large part of their life they were used as general purpose languages rather than just "system" or "perf matters" languages.
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Travis Downs
@trav_downs
Replying to
@johnregehr
@lemire
and 3 others
Agreed. Hopefully we'll be left with a systems language focused on system stuff. My bet is on Rust or a future entrant. Swift is an Apple thing and Apple things usually stay Apple things. Of course, if Apple takes over the world, we'll all be writing OSes in Swift I guess.
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William Saar
@saarw
Replying to
@lemire
@johnregehr
and 3 others
Swift has had some plans for ownership tracking and better control of stack use, like Rust... but they seem to be focusing a lot of resources to fight garbage-collected languages for the web app space
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Ilja A. Iwas
@iljawascoding
After tinkering for well over a year, we are close to dumping Swift on the server, and rewriting our app in something else. Memory keeps leaking at alarming rate (~1 GB+/day). Combination of Vapor 3, SwiftNIO, & Swift Foundation for Linux doesn’t seem production ready. 😟
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@saarw
and 5 others
It's perfectly fine that Swift has a different focus. I don't think features like sophisticated safe lightweight references fit into it at this point. It could gain features for ownership, limited lightweight references and control over memory but it'd be a much different thing.
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