White House urges developers to dump C and C++::Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.
I’m not sure what to think about this. It’s bizarre, the White House making any recommendations on programming languages.
They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make? And so why make one at all?
They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make?
It’s possible that they are acting on the advice of advisors who are authorities in this field.
And so why make one at all?
I expect it’s because information and industrial security are components of national security, which is of great concern to them, and those things depend on software.
I’m not surprised to see this, given that state-sponsored electronic attacks are on the rise these days.
This is exactly why people sound sophomoric when they say “lobbying needs to go!” There are some drastic problems with lobbying as it is allowed now, but the last thing we need is the government regulating things they know nothing about without the input of experts. On top of that, it’s nonsense that I can’t pass my local councilman on the street and stop and push them to spend more time addressing important issues like climate change.
It’s important to remember that the argument against lobbying isn’t about the broadest sense of the word “lobbying”, but rather about corporations and other moneyed interests having unfair and unhealthy influence over the laws that govern everyone else.
The people who decry lobbying probably agree with you; they’re just using the word in an implicitly narrow context.
I don’t think your argument quite holds up. The directionality is important. It’s true that the government can’t always know about technical things directly, but I think it’s fine for the government to be expected to know which experts they need to consult, and for that process not to just be open to everyone (which just means more open to those with more money).
Gov is getting rusty
I agree, let’s start with dumping Windows.
Team Fortran raise up, but not too fast our old bones aren’t as strong as they used to be.
Good luck with that, C/C++ are still crazy popular
Damn, it’s been like 25 years since I touched either of those. Aside from OS development, do people really do that anymore?
https://www.geekboots.com/story/why-c-is-so-popular-and-still-the-best-programming-language
Basically, C runs the modern world. WiFi, MacOS, Windows, Linux, and so much more
Embedded systems developer here. If you’re programming on ARM or one of the other big microcontrollers there aren’t many well supported options. ARM’s official Keil compiler and libraries are C and C++ and I see no official movement to change that.
They have literally decades in building those tools.
Microsoft’s multithreaded OS ThreadX is C code. They just bought it for a large undisclosed amount in 2018. It ain’t going anywhere soon.
AWS’s FreeRTOS is C. Not going anywhere.
Embedded development toolchains are very slow to change.
