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2024-02-29
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Found this funny https://www.infoworld.com/article/3713203/white-house-urges-developers-to-dump-c-and-c.html
That the white house actually said that. Perhaps I'm ignorant and WH has guided people on such technical matters before.
Have you read the actual document the WH team produced? (I have)
@U04V70XH6 no I haven't. I just saw the article
https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/memory-safety-statements-of-support/ has links to the report etc and some industry responses.
This page has other ONCD documents, including a request for public comment on the open source and memory-safe languages stuff https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/documents/
This doesn’t seem uncharacteristic for the US government. They also have been known to require military applications use Ada over C/C++
Aye, and I've dealt with UK DoD software reqs back in the 80s, and then NASA software reqs in the 90s, that both flowed down to all their contractors. Government advising on IT is nothing new.
If I recall correctly, the Swedish military & friends has also opted for Ada over C/++ for the same reasons, e.g. in the JAS Gripen fighters.
C++ with proper tooling can be as safe as Ada, we have plenty of C++ running on airplanes.
Inertia is probably a part of it. Maybe they didn’t find the purported benefits of C++ convincing at the time, and at some point they just passed the point where it would make sense to switch. It’s probably not as much about what the tooling looks like now, but what it looked like in like 1989.
First they come for the memory unsafe languages. Then they come for not-strict-enough type systems…

The actual recommendations/reasoning make sense - its just really funny to think of Joe Biden personally taking time out of <too political thought for here> to know about, understand, and give a recommendation on C++.
You see one of the senators mentioned who's a 70 something year old lawyer I'm sure everyone who has their name on the document are highly qualified on the subject
There are probably many degrees of separation between anyone who gave actionable good advice and anyone who translated it to policy. The NSA iirc gave similar recommendations recently which pointed towards Java and C#
@UK0810AQ2 this one? https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-releases-guidance-on-how-to-protect-against-software-memory-safety-issues/ (link to the full report is there [pdf])
As someone out of the loop on how Government advising for a language or other even works, I can't comment too much on that part. But I kinda agree against C and C++. When you learn about all the things that can go wrong with C, or C++, depending on optimization levels, version changes, and other stuff, and read people defending C/C++ in forums or internet channels, it's actually kinda scary... So many things can go wrong with a simple "Hello, World" in C, that I don't understand why so many people still choose C as their main language...
@U3Y18N0UC There's so much stuff already written in C++ and people in C++ already think in it. I had an interview for a C++ position recently. The guys interviewing showed me code for a function to search for a given string in a list of strings written as a for loop (using an iterator) and asked me how can the function be improved. When I said "you can use std::find instead of the loop" I could almost hear the groan.
Heh, that would probably be me too (I was on the ANSI C++ Committee for eight years, covering the time the Standard Template Library was proposed, discussed, and finally added).