Comment by simonask
5 days ago
I’m sorry, but there is an incredible amount of hard data on this, including the number of CVEs directly attributable to memory safety bugs. This is publicly available information, and we as an industry should take it seriously.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but this cavalier attitude towards it reads like vaccine skepticism to me. It is not serious.
Programming can be inconsequential, but it can also be national security. I know which engineers I would trust with the latter, and they aren’t the kind who believe that discipline is “enough”.
CVE are important but there’s also a lot of theatre there. How many are known exploitable? Most aren’t if you follow threat intel. Most of the Internet infrastructure is running c/c++ and is very safe.
It's fine to have a sober view of the severity, but we can hopefully agree in general that writing any program in C or C++ that faces the internet requires extreme caution.
I think anything that faces the internet needs extreme caution. I've done enough pentesting myself to see that mistakes are abound and most of them are logic problems.
Number of CVEs is completely irrelevant. Also Google's or Microsoft's priorities are completely irrelevant. If you have reliable data from the real world, please show it to me.
So what do you propose to do?
I propose that we start taking the appropriate amount of professional responsibility.
That includes being honest about the actual costs of software when you don’t YOLO the details. Zero UB is table stakes now - it didn’t use to be, but we don’t live in that world anymore.
It’s totally fine to use C or whatever language for it, but you are absolutely kidding yourself if you think the cost is less than at least an order of magnitude higher than the equivalent code written in Rust, C#, or any other language that helps you avoid these bugs. Rust even lets you get there at zero performance cost, so we’re down to petty squabbles about syntax or culture - not serious.
Thankfully the new cybersecurity laws will help here, when companies map production costs to languages, the needle will keep moving away from those that tank security budgets.
2 replies →
> I propose that we start taking the appropriate amount of professional responsibility.
I agree. For me that means: software engineering should start taking the same attitude to writing software that structural engineers bring to the table when they talk about bridges, buildings and other structures that will have people's lives depending on them. I'm not sure how we're going to make rings out of bits but we need to realize - continuously - that the price of failure is often paid in blood, or in the best case with financial loss and usually not by us. And in turn we should be enabled to impose that same ethic on management, because more often than not that's the root cause of the problem.
> That includes being honest about the actual costs of software when you don’t YOLO the details.
Does that include development cost?
Maintenance costs?
Or just secondary costs?
Why the focus on costs?
> Zero UB is table stakes now - it didn’t use to be, but we don’t live in that world anymore.
This is because 'Rust and C# exist'? Or is it because Java, Erlang, Visual Basic, Lisp etc exist?
> It’s totally fine to use C or whatever language for it, but you are absolutely kidding yourself if you think the cost is less than at least an order of magnitude higher than the equivalent code written in Rust, C#, or any other language that helps you avoid these bugs.
We were talking about responsibility first, and that goes well beyond just measuring 'cost'. The mistake in bringing cost into it is that cost is a business concept that is used to justify picking a particular technology over another. And just like security is an expense that doesn't show anything on the balance sheet if it works besides that it cost money the same goes for picking a programming language eco-system.
So I think focusing on cost is a mistake. That just allows the bookkeeper to make the call and that call will often be the wrong one.
> Rust even lets you get there at zero performance cost, so we’re down to petty squabbles about syntax or culture - not serious.
The debate goes a lot further than that. You have millions of people that are writing software every day that are not familiar with Rust. To get them to pick a managed language over what they are used to is going to take a lot of convincing.
It starts of with ethics, and I don't think it should start off with picking a favorite language. You educate, show by example and you deliver at or below the same cost that those other eco-systems do and then you slowly eat the world because your projects are delivered on-time, with provably lower real world defects and hopefully at a lower cost.
And then I really couldn't care what language was picked, in the rust world that translates into 'anything but C' because that is perceived to be the enemy somehow, which is strange because there are many alternatives to rust that are perfectly suitable, have much higher mind share already.
C is - even today - at 10x the popularity that rust is, it will take a massive amount of resources to switch those people over, and likely it will take more than one generation. In the meantime all of the C code in the world will have to be maintained, which means there is massive job security for people learning C. For people learning rust to the exclusion of learning C that situation is far worse. This needs to be solved.
These are not 'petty squabbles' about syntax or culture. They are the harsh reality of the software development world at large, which has seen massive projects deployed at scale developed with those really bad languages full of undefined behavior (well, that's at least one thing that Assembly Language has going for it, as long as the CPU does what it says in the book undefined behavior doesn't exist). People are going to point at that and say 'good enough'. And they see all those memory overflows, CVEs etc as a given, and they realize that in spite of all of those the main vector for security issues is people, and configuration mistakes not so much the software itself.
This is not ideal, obviously, but C, like any bad habit, is very hard to dislodge if your main argument is 'you should drop this tool because mine is better'. Then you need to show that your tool is better, so much better that it negates the cost to switch. And that's a very tall order, for any programming language, much more so for one that is struggling for adoption in the first place.
9 replies →