4 ms·

Yeah because the committee is now people that a) really love C++, and b) don't care enough about safety to use Rust instead. I think there are plenty of people

Yeah because the committee is now people that a) really love C++, and b) don't care enough about safety to use Rust instead. I think there are plenty of people that must use C++ due to legacy, management or library reasons and they care about safety. But those people aren't going to join language committees.

john_the_writer 1y ago
I don't know that they don't care about safety. They just don't agree with the definition others have picked. I remember when managed code became a thing. I being an old c++ dev noted that memory was always managed. It was managed by me.
DannyBee 1y ago
“But those people aren't going to join language committees.” This is amusingly wrong in the worst way. In the case of c++, they were there but they left years ago when it became clear the committee didn’t see this problem as existential
- pjmlp 1y ago
  And in the old days, as I keep telling, many of us (users) prefered C++ over C, exactly due to the safety and stronger typing.
  - DannyBee 1y ago
    Yep. You either die young or live long enough to become the villain
gloryjulio 1y ago
Like the google people who can't convince them and went on to create carbon?
- motorest 1y ago
  > Like the google people who can't convince them and went on to create carbon? Lots of people in mega-companies set forth to reinvent the wheel. I think we have enough track record to understand that the likes of Google don't walk over water and some of the output is rather questionable and far from the gold standard. Appeals to authority are a logical fallacy for a reason.
WalterBright 1y ago
D adds a lot to memory safety without needing to struggle with program redesigns that Rust requires. These include: 1. bounds checked arrays (you can still use raw pointers instead if you like) 2. default initialization 3. static checks for escaping pointers 4. optional use of pure functions 5. transitive const and immutable qualifiers 6. ranges based on slices rather than pointer pairs
- Voultapher 1y ago
  > With program redesigns that Rust requires Why does Rust sometimes require program redesigns? Because these programs are flawed at some fundamental level. D lacks the most important and hardest kind of safety and that is reference safety - curiously C++ profiles also lacks any solution to that problem. A significant amount of production C++ code is riddled with UB and will never be made safe by repainting it and bounds checking. Claiming that not being forced to fix something fundamentally broken is an advantage when talking about safety doesn't make you look like a particularly serious advocate for the topic.
  - drysine 1y ago
    > Because these programs are flawed at some fundamental level. That's a very strong statement. How do you support it with arguments?
    - Voultapher 1y ago
      We have strong evidence that anything with 100k+ LoC that uses C or C++ will have use-after-free bugs because of reference semantics. I have no data on D but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same case there as well. You need to think about ownership and haphazardly treating it as a free-for-all is a fundamental design flaw IMO. Shared mutable state is bad for the same reasons mutable global variables are frowned upon. One needs to keep the sum total of all places and all possible paths leading to them in context for reasoning about any of them. This very very quickly becomes intractable for human minds.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
shawn_w 1y ago
They could also care about safety but just not like the Rust approach.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  This was asked at the aforementioned chat. Andreas Weis (MISRA) responded along the lines of "You shouldn't be writing new code in C++ if you want guarantees". Might not have the identity correct, my notes aren't in front of me.
  - john_the_writer 1y ago
    Love this quote. An love the intent.
    - motorest 1y ago
      > Love this quote. An love the intent. What intent do you think it has? That proposals are still being worked on and haven't been published in a specification yet?
  - motorest 1y ago
    > (...) "You shouldn't be writing new code in C++ if you want guarantees". I'm afraid context is required to actually understand what was said. For example, it can mean anything including very obvious things like stating that the committee is still working on proposals to provide guarantees and they won't feature in a standard until the work is done and a new standard is published. Which would be stating the obvious.

john_the_writer 1y ago

I don't know that they don't care about safety. They just don't agree with the definition others have picked. I remember when managed code became a thing. I being an old c++ dev noted that memory was always managed. It was managed by me.

DannyBee 1y ago

“But those people aren't going to join language committees.” This is amusingly wrong in the worst way. In the case of c++, they were there but they left years ago when it became clear the committee didn’t see this problem as existential

pjmlp 1y ago
And in the old days, as I keep telling, many of us (users) prefered C++ over C, exactly due to the safety and stronger typing.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  Yep. You either die young or live long enough to become the villain

gloryjulio 1y ago

Like the google people who can't convince them and went on to create carbon?

motorest 1y ago
> Like the google people who can't convince them and went on to create carbon? Lots of people in mega-companies set forth to reinvent the wheel. I think we have enough track record to understand that the likes of Google don't walk over water and some of the output is rather questionable and far from the gold standard. Appeals to authority are a logical fallacy for a reason.

WalterBright 1y ago

D adds a lot to memory safety without needing to struggle with program redesigns that Rust requires. These include: 1. bounds checked arrays (you can still use raw pointers instead if you like) 2. default initialization 3. static checks for escaping pointers 4. optional use of pure functions 5. transitive const and immutable qualifiers 6. ranges based on slices rather than pointer pairs

Voultapher 1y ago
> With program redesigns that Rust requires Why does Rust sometimes require program redesigns? Because these programs are flawed at some fundamental level. D lacks the most important and hardest kind of safety and that is reference safety - curiously C++ profiles also lacks any solution to that problem. A significant amount of production C++ code is riddled with UB and will never be made safe by repainting it and bounds checking. Claiming that not being forced to fix something fundamentally broken is an advantage when talking about safety doesn't make you look like a particularly serious advocate for the topic.
- drysine 1y ago
  > Because these programs are flawed at some fundamental level. That's a very strong statement. How do you support it with arguments?
  - Voultapher 1y ago
    We have strong evidence that anything with 100k+ LoC that uses C or C++ will have use-after-free bugs because of reference semantics. I have no data on D but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same case there as well. You need to think about ownership and haphazardly treating it as a free-for-all is a fundamental design flaw IMO. Shared mutable state is bad for the same reasons mutable global variables are frowned upon. One needs to keep the sum total of all places and all possible paths leading to them in context for reasoning about any of them. This very very quickly becomes intractable for human minds.
- WalterBright 1y ago

shawn_w 1y ago

They could also care about safety but just not like the Rust approach.

AlotOfReading 1y ago
This was asked at the aforementioned chat. Andreas Weis (MISRA) responded along the lines of "You shouldn't be writing new code in C++ if you want guarantees". Might not have the identity correct, my notes aren't in front of me.
- john_the_writer 1y ago
  Love this quote. An love the intent.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Love this quote. An love the intent. What intent do you think it has? That proposals are still being worked on and haven't been published in a specification yet?
- motorest 1y ago
  > (...) "You shouldn't be writing new code in C++ if you want guarantees". I'm afraid context is required to actually understand what was said. For example, it can mean anything including very obvious things like stating that the committee is still working on proposals to provide guarantees and they won't feature in a standard until the work is done and a new standard is published. Which would be stating the obvious.