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> Obviously not Is it obvious? I haven't heard of new projects in non-memory-safe languages lately, and I would think they would struggle to attract contributo
by lmm 11mo ago
> Obviously not
Is it obvious? I haven't heard of new projects in non-memory-safe languages lately, and I would think they would struggle to attract contributors.
- pjmlp 11mo agoGame development, graphics and VFX industry, AI tooling infrastructure, embedded development, Maker tools like Arduino and ESP32, compiler development.
- ottah 11mo agohttps://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle
- lmm 11mo agoZig at least claims some level of memory safety in their marketing. How real that is I don't know.
- vlovich123 11mo agoAbout as real as claiming that C/C++ is memory safe because of sanitizers IMHO.
- Ygg2 11mo agoI mean, Zig does have non-null pointers. It prevents some UB. Just not all.
- pjmlp 11mo agoWhich you can achieve in C and C++ with static analysis rules, breaking compilation if pointers aren't checked for nullptr/NULL before use. Zig would have been a nice proposition in the 20th century, alongside languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal.
- tomnipotent 11mo agoI'm unaware of any such marketing.
- dwattttt 11mo agoZig does claim that it > ... has a debug allocator that maintains memory safety in the face of use-after-free and double-free which is probably true (in that it's not possible to violate memory safety on the debug allocator, although it's still a strong claim). But beyond that there isn't really any current marketing for Zig claiming safety, beyond a heading in an overview of "Performance and Safety: Choose Two".
- gf000 11mo agoRuntime checks can only validate code paths taken, though. Also, C sanitizers are quite good as well nowadays.
- tomnipotent 11mo agoThat's a library feature (not intended for release builds), not a language feature.
- weebull 11mo agoIt is intended for release builds. The ReleaseSafe target will keep the checks. ReleaseFast and ReleaseSmall will remove the checks, but those aren't the recommended release modes for general software. Only for when performance or size are critical.
- tomnipotent 11mo agoDebugAllocator essentially becomes a no-op wrapper when you use those targets.
- gjajric 11mo agoI have heard different arguments, such as https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/ https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/ .
- mmooss 11mo agoOut of curiosity, do the LLMs all use memory safe languages?
- jandrewrogers 11mo agoNew high-scale data infrastructure projects I am aware of mostly seem to be C++ (often C++20). A bit of Rust, which I’ve used, and Zig but most of the hardcore stuff is still done in C++ and will be for the foreseeable future. It is easy to forget that the state-of-the-art implementations of a lot of systems software is not open source. They don’t struggle to attract contributors because of language choices, being on the bleeding edge of computer science is selling point enough.
- ACCount37 11mo agoThere's a "point of no return" when you start to struggle to hire anyone on your teams because no one knows the language and no one is willing to learn. But C++ is very far from it.
- pornel 11mo agoThere's always someone willing to write COBOL for the right premium. I'm working on Rust projects, so I may have incomplete picture, but I'm from what I see when devs have a choice, they prefer working with Rust over C++ (if not due to the language, at least due to the build tooling).
- ACCount37 11mo agoWriting C++ is easier than writing Rust. But writing safe multithreaded code in C++? I don't want to write multithreaded C++ at all unless I explicitly want a new hole in my foot. Rust I barely have any experience with, but it might be less frustrating than that.
- dwattttt 11mo agoAnecdotally, my "wow, this Rust business might really go somewhere" moment was when I tried adding multithreading to a random tool I made (dispatching tasks to new threads). Multithreading had not been planned or architected for, it took 30 min, included the compiler informing me I couldn't share a hashmap with those threads unsynchronised, and informing me on how to fix it.