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Would you bet your life/money/application security on valgrind and a linter being sufficient to catch all of those issues, knowing that a single mistake invalid

Would you bet your life/money/application security on valgrind and a linter being sufficient to catch all of those issues, knowing that a single mistake invalidates every guarantee the standard gives you? That's the situation we're in with C++. When you're building old code, the compiler can't check that it upholds the standard to the degree that it can for modern C++. That's why the advice is to update the code, because the tooling can't save you otherwise. Rust by contrast guarantees that you either have a compiler/runtime bug or the issue is more narrowly localized than "potentially every single line of code". Sure, I'd like better, but it's an improvement.

staunton 3y ago
> Would you bet your life Definitely not. But it's rare that so much is at stake. I would not bet my life on the borrow checker either, there's a lot of things that can go wrong in a program. Money is of course a question of how much. Application security is just "the above". The "undefined behavior can explode your PC, travel back in time and become your father" problem is not to be underestimated. However, in cases where old code works well for years but really has some lurking bad UB, one can disable some optimizations and be conservative with compiler choice. A lot of people dislike the trend towards compilers being ever more punishing of UB and I can see their point, while it's of course hard to argue for (let alone find) a balance between performance and some robustness to ubiquitous and almost inevitable code issues. Rust's giarantees are nice and I sure would prefer working on a modern Rust project than any C++ project, as well as a modern C++ project compared to C99-with-classes. Modernizing existing code is a different matter. I've seen very few attempts at modernizing a big and old C++ codebase, no attempts where it clearly paid off and one attempt where it went wrong...

staunton 3y ago

> Would you bet your life Definitely not. But it's rare that so much is at stake. I would not bet my life on the borrow checker either, there's a lot of things that can go wrong in a program. Money is of course a question of how much. Application security is just "the above". The "undefined behavior can explode your PC, travel back in time and become your father" problem is not to be underestimated. However, in cases where old code works well for years but really has some lurking bad UB, one can disable some optimizations and be conservative with compiler choice. A lot of people dislike the trend towards compilers being ever more punishing of UB and I can see their point, while it's of course hard to argue for (let alone find) a balance between performance and some robustness to ubiquitous and almost inevitable code issues. Rust's giarantees are nice and I sure would prefer working on a modern Rust project than any C++ project, as well as a modern C++ project compared to C99-with-classes. Modernizing existing code is a different matter. I've seen very few attempts at modernizing a big and old C++ codebase, no attempts where it clearly paid off and one attempt where it went wrong...