3 ms·

I think it’s time we start expecting 100% memory safety as table stakes, because any flaws are catastrophic. Moore’s Law has more than paid for it; Android coul

• foerbert 6y ago
  For many attempts, like Rust, I don't think the problem is related to Moore's Law at all. It's more a matter of dev time, effort, and expertise. And even then, I don't think Rust's mechanisms even can be 100% as they are now. Ada's pools are probably the one that is most related to Moore's Law and actually capable of 100%, or so I'd expect.
• ajxs 6y ago
  One area where I think Ada has the edge is providing language constructs that make bare metal programming safer. Concepts like 'dangling pointers' and 'memory leaks' aren't relevant in a programming environment without a heap. In bare-metal programming on a microcontroller you're more likely working within a flat memory model where the 'memory safety' provided by some modern programming languages is less relevant. Arguably, this is the context within which safety-critical programming is actually happening.
  • steveklabnik 6y ago
    You can absolutely cause a pointer to dangle without heap allocation. Pointers can point to the stack too. You also have stuff like iterator invalidation, which is sort of a special case of a dangling pointer.
    • ajxs 6y ago
      You're absolutely right. Pardon me. I should have written the more specific 'use-after-free'.
    • Gibbon1 6y ago
      I do bare metal programming. I have a macro + linker widget called stack_allocated_ptr(x) So I can write guards like if(stack_allocated_ptr(thingie)) { exit_critical_error( "oopies"); }