No offense to the many bright and capable people who have worked hard on the C/C++ language, tools, compilers, libraries, kernels, etc over the years, but we will someday look back on it as asbestos and wonder why we kept at it for so damn long.
> No offense to the many bright and capable people who have worked hard on the C/C++ language, tools, compilers, libraries, kernels, etc over the years, but we will someday look back on it as asbestos and wonder why we kept at it for so damn long.
We won't wonder at all. We will understand that those people are the ONLY ones that stepped up to the task over 50 years to write this kind of software, organize standards bodies for their languages and platforms, get their software packaged as part of mainstream operating systems and out into the world, deal with patches from users, and help millions of other people make a living, enable the internet to happen, etc.
We will wonder why with all the millions of lines of C/C++ reference code available to be perused and then rewritten in Rust, Pascal, C#, Zig or Nim, and the vociferousness of their advocates, why that didn't happen in a reasonable timeframe.
We will wonder why all the Lisp and Haskell programmers who sneer down their nose at working C/C++ programmers in forums like this on a daily basis, didn't get off their asses with their One True Language (TM) and come to the worlds rescue.
The answer will be: these people aren't doers - they are talkers. It's one thing to get a toy proof of concept OS in your favourite language of choice that supports like 5 drivers. It's another thing to contribute to and build an ecosystem depended on by millions of developers daily. C/C++ people may not always be the sharpest tools in the shed, and they may be a dime a dozen. But they know how to organize themselves in loose groups of more than just a few developers, and work with other people.
We may have issues with the quality of what they ship on a frequent basis, but at least they ship instead of posting endless comments on internet forums about how it's all the others peoples fault.
Had UNIX been a comercial endevour and it would have failed, unfortunely it wasn't the case, and now C plagues the industry.
Easy, every single time .NET team does some advances into that direction, it gets sabotaged by WinDev and their C++ love.
XNA vs DirectXTK, .NET vs COM/WinRT,...
Windows could have turned into something like Android, with managed userspace and a very constrained native layer for restricted use cases, naturally WinDev cannot let that ever happen.
If by some minor miracle a C# or Java GUI app is not slow, then it will use a ton of memory. A whole OS of such apps would be a nightmare.
And anything performance intensive was done in the NDK anyway.
All of this because of Java.
Those improvements are exactly what WinDev sabotaged in regards to Windows.
Also in case you have forgotten, Objective-C and Swift are also managed languages, check chapter 5 of Garbage Collection Handbook, or any other CS reference in automatic memory management algorithms.
So since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM based, not always surfaced to .NET, and we are expected to just go through books like ".NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide" and do the needful ourselves.
WinRT as introduced in Windows 8 was then the full reboot, with .NET metadata taking over TLB files (COM type libraries) and introducing a new base interface IInspectable.
So the long term vision pursued by Synofsky, was that .NET Native and C++/CX would take over with COM fully replacing .NET.
Naturally it all failed down during the borked execution, and now you still have devs pushing for C++/WinRT, the C++/CX replacement, with ATL like tooling as "modern". Maybe it is modern given the tools that they are used at WinDev, I guess.
Ars even has a nice article how this reboot took place,
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
More secure languages and APIs can only win if they are both easier to use and offer the same features.
The problem at Microsoft is that what Office and WinDev want, drives the whole business no matter what, those "serious regressions, be it usability, features, bloat, or other things" get fixed, if one cares enough to make it happen.
Speaking which, Office now is an heavy user of JavaScript, less perfomant than .NET, because it needs to be in the cloud.
Whereas Windows, while king of the desktop, is undeniable that it lost the backend to POSIX clones even if we consider MS shops with IIS, where languages like Java and Go dominate.
Also apparently PWAs are cool now as fight against ChromeOS, which from performance point of view are much worse than those former Win32 alternatives.
If you think that's not true, C++ programmers, raise your hand if you were ever working on/contributing to a C program and you proposed C++ as a safer/better language and got shot down.
So even C++ is facing the same kind of challenges now faced by newer programming languages.
Couldn't agree more with this.
Not to take away from what they've shipped, but it bears repeating that they are also, generally, profligate writers of severe security holes. Some of the most expert programmers in the world have created mighty CVEs.
There's a school of thought that it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and your post walks close to that line, but when the tool is full of footguns even the experts can't avoid that cause tremendous damage to bystanders, then perhaps these people who know how to organize themselves in loose groups of more than just a few developers need to prioritize helping us all move to better tools.
Other segments of the programming population embrace a wild west culture of change, for good or bad. If the JS world can insist on a new frontend stack every few years, why can't managers and lead developers put their foot down and steadily back C/C++ into the corner where it belongs, where literally no other tool will do, and where it's doing the absolute minimum possible?
Since they're so good at shipping, ship us better tools! It may not seem a fair criticism -- it doesn't sound fair to me when I say it.
But I'll give you the answer to my question: They don't want to move away from C/C++, because they don't see a problem. The C/C++ devs I've chatted with on this topic have mostly been convinced they know how to write secure code, that they are capable of taming the distinctive complexity that spirals out of an expanding C++ codebase. Some of them might even be right! They wear their capabilities with pride. To admit that their hard-earned skills were invested in a tool that bears replacing is not something they can consider.
To change, first you have to admit you have a problem. And at least among the C/C++ devs I've talked to about it, few have professed a problem. Combined with the first mover advantage, I fear we'll be having this same debate 50 years from now.
I feel like you're not entirely serious about it, but i'm not sure about the premise of that statement.
To me, it feels like C/C++ has a barrier of entry that's significantly higher than that of other languages: e.g. everything from JavaScript and Python to those like .NET and Java.
Wouldn't that mean that it'd be easier to learn and be productive in the latter and therefore those devs would be more abundant? Whereas to be capable at C++, you'd need a bit more discipline/patience/whatever and therefore there would be fewer developers?
I see the same in regards to Rust - many talk about it, those who are used to low level development often look into it or adopt it, however those that are used to the languages with a higher level of abstraction, don't venture into actually using it quite as often.
For example, in the JetBrains survey of 2021, about 6% of people used Rust in the past 12 months, but 7% of people are planning of adopting it: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/ Contrast that with C#, which was used by 21% and had the interest of 4% and Java, which was used by 49% and had the interest of 4%. There are probably better data points about this, i just found this vaguely interesting in regards to that argument. Of course, a counterpoint could be that Rust is new, but if it's so popular, then why people aren't adopting it more quickly?
Summary: regardless of the language being discussed (C/C++/Rust/...), i feel that there will always be fewer developers in the languages with lower level of abstraction, since they feel inherently harder.
Ex C/C++ dev here. I deliberately moved away from working with them in my career (first 10 or so years doing it, last 10 years doing anything but). Not just because "C++ is hard" but because "C++ is intrinsically unsafe in multiple, treacherous ways".
I still have tons of respect for programmers who choose to stay working with C++, but I decided long ago it wasn't for me.
I think it might be a generational thing. I know a lot of 'mediocre' programmers in their 40s and 50s who learnt C++ as their first language and never bothered to really learn anything else (possibly some C#). I'm sure none of them have heard of the JetBrains Survey.
Especially in this context it's important to mention that C and C++ are actually very different languages ;)
I'm sure all these things exist in these languages, totally unused.
But are they complete, and usuable enough in production? Did they ever acquire enough mindshare?
Did they get enough buy in?
The clear answer is no.
The point is, I think speculative characterisations of <community>-dev members as lazy/unproductive is off mark.
Let's see: is there a mature, maintained TLS stack written in a memory-safe, high performant, cross platform language that Mozilla could have been using for free, instead of NSS? Your argument is that there isn't one because only C++ coders are "doers" instead of "talkers" but this argument is wrong because such a stack does exist. It's JCA/JSSE and ships with every OpenJDK.
JCA/JSSE is a full, open source TLS and cryptography stack. It's written, even at the lowest levels, in Java, in which this kind of memory error cannot occur. It's usable from C/C++ via JNI. It's commercially maintained and has been maintained for decades. It keeps up with the latest features. Its performance in the latest versions is comparable to OpenSSL even (not always in the past).
Mozilla could have used it. They could have improved it, even. They've shipped browsers with integrated Java before, in times when computers were much less powerful. They chose not to, why, well, the charitable explanation might be download size or performance, but we could just as easily argue it's because C++ guys don't really care about security. Bugs happen, they ship a fix, people let them off the hook. Eh another buffer overflow, who cares. Not like anyone is going to switch products over that, right?
Reality is, our industry could rewrite lots of software in safer languages and already has. Java has tons of libraries that do the same thing as C++ libraries, and which could be used today. You can shrink HotSpot down to about 7mb compressed, last time I experimented with this, which is like 10% of the size of a typical mobile app. It's just not a big deal. Perhaps the biggest problem is that JNI is an awkward FFI but there are fixes for that also, the new FFI (Panama) is a lot better than the old one.
OK. I'll make an installer to install Java with my project. But the customer has another older version, or a competitor version, or ..... I don't care anymore.
Do I have to build this library? What paraphernalia do I have to install and learn to automatize, build and test a complex Java library? Do I have to maintain a JNI interface too?
Where is the JCA/JSSE source code? (I can't find it for real) And who maintains it? Oracle? What if Oracle one day pulls the plug or comes after me with one of their famous legal moves just because?
These are my concerns. You might try to convince me, but I already learnt about C/C++ libraries, DLL hell, etc, and have all my fixes in place.
> Bugs happen
They will still happen. Put your heart at peace.
To answer your questions:
1. Java is these days like UNIX, there are lots of "distros". OpenJDK is the upstream on which most of them are based. You can just use that unless you have some particular preference for the other vendors. However the compatibility situation is much better, there aren't any compatibility issues and JVMs are all more or less drop-in replacements for each other (Android is an exception but has got a lot better over time).
2. You don't need to install Java alongside your app. The JVMs is just a library and a few data files. You can easily bundle it with your app and the user will never know.
3. JCA/JSSE is built in to Java so there's nothing to build. Additionally you don't have to build Java libraries to use them anyway, because binary distribution works so everyone just distributes binary JAR files.
4. The source code is spread around several modules because JCA is pluggable. But for example a lot of the crypto code is found here:
https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/master/src/java.base/sha...
5. Oracle maintains it but other companies contribute, like Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat etc (well, to Java as a whole). It's released under the GPL with Classpath exception license. They aren't going to come after you for using it - there are 12 million Java developers in the world. The only company that has ever got sued is Google and that's because they violated the (at the time non open source) license of Java to make a mobile version that wasn't from Sun. They knew they were doing it and chose to chance it anyway (which worked out quite well for them actually). Since then Java became fully open source and this no longer applies, and it'd have never applied to normal users of it anyway.
I'm not trying to convince you here of anything, only to point out that everyone saying "there was no alternative" is just wrong. The failure mode here is not sufficiently advanced fuzzers. The failure is that there has been an alternative to NSS for years but C++ shops like Mozilla keep maintaining crappy decades old C libraries with memcpy calls all over the place, because they know and like C. That's it. That's all it boils down to.
Exactly!
> "and prefer to keep writing buffer overflows than finding out"
Not exactly. I would rather take the risk of writing buffer overflows than using over-bloated infrastructure, being in code size and/or performance, tooling, including learning time. It's a tradeoff. It's always a tradeoff. Mozilla might have had their own reasons, and probably not on a whim. If I have to write the software for an ECU the approach will be different (no, it won't be Java).
I've been in the industry for a long time now (C/C++, mostly embedded). The pattern is the same. This time is you with Java, it might be the Rust/Go crowd , the other 4 users with Ada or the 2 users with FP: everybody loves to hate C/C++ and everybody have their whiteboard reasons, but C/C++ has been pushing the world forward for the last 30 years minimum, and it's not stopping anytime soon. There must be a reason other than "C/C++ programmer are lazy dummies, they prefer to write bugs instead of learning the marvels of [insert random language here], because they are in love with memcpy", don't you think?
The code is there. You can try to link Java JCA/JSSE to Firefox or whatever the project is about. I'm interested in learning how it looks and how it works.
In this case I doubt there'd be a big CPU overhead. There'd be some memory overhead, and browsers compete on that, although of course they're kind of memory pigs already.
"The code is there. You can try to link Java JCA/JSSE to Firefox or whatever the project is about. I'm interested in learning how it looks and how it works."
I think once Panama (the new FFI) gets released it'd be interesting to experiment with this sort of thing, though I don't care about Firefox personally. That would eliminate a lot of the tedious boilerplate you'd otherwise have to churn out.
While my comment was written to be respectful, yours clearly wasn't. I'll politely point you Niklaus Wirth's work on Oberon as just one example of a giant blind spot in the popular consciousness. Once you learn a bit more about the many, many other systems that were built over the years, you can stop spreading a false narrative of heroism and supremacy.
> The answer will be: these people aren't doers - they are talkers.
Ok, now I am thoroughly done with your comment. Niklaus Wirth was anything but a "talker". Look what was built with Oberon and tell us more about how he was a "talker".
It's OK to not know things. But striking out in profound ignorance is completely unnecessary.
We don't vilify people who invented asbestos. We don't vilify workers who installed asbestos. They didn't know better. When we did start to know better, there was a period of denial and even willful ignorance, but eventually the evidence became overwhelming. But now, we know about asbestos, and we're stuck with the consequences to exactly the extent we don't engage in careful cleanups. With the dangers of profoundly unsafe code, we haven't even gotten everyone on the same page yet. It's a long process.
As far talking, I had hoped we could avoid the immature shouty part, as I explicitly acknowledged the many people who put in a lot of work to make C/C++ do things and run fast.
For the doing, I guess I'll be getting back to that. It's far more rewarding than these discussions, frankly.
> and profoundly misunderstood history.
There seems to be a good deal of that.
> They didn't know better.
For what it's worth, we always knew better with C and C++. As I mentioned elsewhere languages were often designed to be safer but as C became more popular the design mistakes of C were pushed on other languages. You can look at FORTRAN, Algol, etc, to see that compiler writers took measures to ensure certain bug classes weren't possible, and those languages were overtaken by those who wanted their code to just compile, correct or not.
Your post definitely comes across as very preachy, so it's odd that you say you were trying to "avoid the immature shouty part" - that's what the parent was basically criticizing you for.
And then to end it on the implication, once again, that some people are "doers" while the rest of us are just posting on HN (the same thing you are doing????) kinda exemplifies it.
People chose C and C++ for bad reasons, even with historic context. Languages used to be more correct. Algol2 used to validate array subscribting and not have null etc. It was C programmers who pushed languages to be worse because it made it easier to write code.
They very much created this problem and we regressed because of their choices. Things could have been a lot better.
The asbestos comparison is pretty apt. Possibly also apt would be steel plants. Yes, steel manufacture is extremely hard on the local environment. Doesn't matter. The world's in the middle of an industrial revolution, and we need steel now. Now now now. We don't have time to wait for the technology to catch up with environmentally-minimized-impact manufacturing. Just condemn a couple cities to twilight noon-times and get on with it.
I don't know if things could have been a lot better and we could be having this conversation on a decentralized network of anonymous machines like we are now. We had to conscript a lot of developers to get here, and make very complex software run on a lot of low-power devices. Erlang, as an example of an alternative, wasn't even open-source unil 1998. LISP machines paused for sixty seconds to do a GC cycle in an era contemporary with machines running executables written in C just... Not requiring that.
Given the factors involved (private ownership of language resources, complex runtime putting minimum requirements on hardware, etc.), C and C++ might be the only two paths of least resistance for a critical era of the software industry.
Maybe! We'll never know. I just don't think that rewriting history to be "C people were doers" is giving any meaningful context to language development, or how much was getting done in languages that were significantly safer.
"C people were doers" is probably reductive, but C and C++ had an alchemy of factors that made something like, say, LISP or Erlang not be where they are.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the most dominant factors are the language runtime's portability, the language's features allowing for relatively low-level access to the backing hardware (i.e. the thinness of the abstraction between C memory access and microprocessor read-write instructions means things like memory maps or "magic addresses" that trigger hardware effects on mutation could just be handed to user code), and the compatibility of the runtime with what came to be (for a ton of reasons) a dominant model of computation in the commercial and consumer space: the x86 architecture.
Quite a bit of the original Unix's were written in assembler. There were good reasons for that - memory and CPU cycles were very scarce back then. I don't know if you have written assembler, but it takes about 5..10 times more lines of code than any high level language, and it isn't the nicest thing to read and isn't exactly portable between architectures.
C is an assembler without those problems, while retaining the speed. Admittedly t achieves that where Alogo60 didn't that by dropping minor things like bounds checking. But to give you a feel for the tradeoff, I could tell you what instructions the compiler would emit for most lines of C code. Best of luck doing that with an Alogo60 thunk.
C hit a sweet spot in other words and Algo60 didn't. C++ was originally called "C with classes". I was there at the time. The magic was Stroustrup's vtables, which gave C programmers OOP (which was all the rage at the time after Simula made it popular, and to be fair was a huge improvement on the abstractions C provided). It was that almost the same speed as C and to achieve it came with all the same disadvantages. But to Stroustrup's credit he did what he could - added stricter type checking (like function prototypes). It was an reasonable improvement. Many of Stroustrup's ideas were back ported to C, and C is a much better language for it.
Then Stroustrup added templates. In hindsight perhaps that's where the rot set in, but templates gave us zero cost abstractions that were at least as type safe as the original. It was an impressive achievement. But then there were hints of the darkness that was to fall upon us, with library after library using templates in novel very useful ways. Stdio was made typesafe. In so many ways.
C++ kept organically growing like that, into the nightmare it is today. I gather no C++ shop uses all of C++ now - all use some subset they can cope with. I lost interest ages ago, as did a lot of other people. They rebelled with against the complexity and lack of safety with things like Java. Microsoft rebelled against Java with C#. Those did solve the memory, type safety footguns and complexity of C++, but at the cost of the one thing about C that made it so attractive - low run time overhead and predictability.
In the mean time the ivory towers played with things like ML and Haskell, which with the benefit of hindsight was truly awesome work but unfortunately for those of us who work close to the metal are less practical than Java, C# and Javascript.
And then out of the swamp rose Rust, a language that has the speed of C and the type safety of ML and Haskell. Well sort of.
I still remember when I first read the Rust spec and thought they were kidding themselves - it promised so much and sounded so improbable it looked like a crypto ponzi scheme. Type inference,memory and thread saftey and no GC, what was this heresy? Then I dabbled, wrote a few Rust programs, fought the borrow checker until we make an accommodation, read the standard library and saw all those unsafes - and realised it was real. It was not perfect, but all those compromises to make it work is what reality looks like.
Where were we. Oh yes:
> Things could have been a lot better.
Things _are_ a lot better my friend. It just took us longer than expected to get there.
That wasn't because people made bad choices. They made a whole pile of small choices that solved their particular problem. It pains me to say this now, but after dealing with C++ for years anything would look good, and Java 1.0 did look very good to me. Admittedly it only looked good for a while, but I would never say the people who picked Java up at the time made a bad choice, just like I would never say the people who chose C over assembler made a bad choice.
I think it is the market values more features and performance, with incremental improvement to current technology at small expense of security. Or the cost of features and performance with currently available tools and work force ( C / C++ ) is vastly cheaper than rewriting it in what ever PL that is.
The only reason why we are starting to do it now, is because the total computer market is 10x larger than we had. Tech is also used 10x more and all of a sudden the cost of security may be worth the cost to switch.
It is all a economic model. or Market Interest. Nothing to do with Armchair and Doers.
It still is true that fuzzing has managed to find a whole slew of bugs that were otherwise not found, and it is generally easier to automate and add without requiring a ton of engineer time. It is meant to be an addition on top, not a replacement for other techniques.
- Extensive non-fuzzing testing.
- Regular static analysis.
- Being actively maintained and overseen by a competent security team, with a bug bounty program on top.
I believe I've also seen mentions of independent security audits outside the post.
Edit: emphasis is on the fuzzing, because that is how the bug was finally discovered.
Maybe. But there is good reason for C dominance - it's low level and close to systems as in "syscalls and stuff". And we need that level of systems control, not only for max performance but also for not loosing what is available in hw and os.
Asm is the other option to have full functionality :) Maybe it's just case of available libraries but still C is curently only one option for feature completness. And on low levels all you have is bytes and bits and calls and that allows to do everything with bits, bytes and calls - Core Wars style - and most of languages try to prevent or easy use of that by cutting possibilities, eg. "goto is so nono !11".
And yes, C is not perfect and bullshit even grows, eg. in last years NULL checks are "optimized-out"...
C actually should be improved and not fucked up into forced disuse...
It can't, it won't, it isn't.
The last major update has C99 and even that was minor from a security point of view.
For better or worse, it's frozen.
As for NSS. It's a pure data manipulation library. Algorithms, data structures, not more. It doesn't need to do syscalls and stuff. There's not much benefit to writing it in C and as we just saw, a lot of downsides. It could have been written in many other languages.
It's complete nonsense that C is needed for accessing the HW. High level languages can do low-level bibanging just fine.
So yes, there's a good reason, but that is inertia. Literally too big to fail, so it keeps on living. Even if we tomorrow outlawed C, drafted people to start rewriting things in a memory-managed language, and so on, it would take decades to get rid of it.
I call this the mold seeping through the wallpaper. C++ tries to paper over C's terrible array model by using collection class templates, but those constructs leak. Too many things need raw pointers.
At very least they provide an initial searching point.
On C, C++ and Objective-C, any line of code is a possible cause for memory corruption, integer overflow, or implicit conversions that lead to data loss.
This applies to other languages with unsafe code blocks, note that JOVIAL and ESPOL were the first ones offering such capability.
In an 'unsafe' block.
On the other hand, something like Java via JNI wouldn't, because it copies the data to a different address space as it goes through the language boundary. Horribly inefficient, but at least the C code only causes security issues in the C regions. By the time it gets back into Java it either crashes or it's safe again, no undefined behaviour leaks through the API boundary.
And herein lies the problem. Your statement is correct. But that type definition is exactly why C++ feels like a 50's car retrofitted with an electric drivetrain and a DVD player on the dash
It will almost run like a modern thing but it will fail when it shouldn't.
One thing in practice I like about Rust over C++ is the "easy option" is safe, and you have to do things like write 'unsafe' to opt out of safety.
Certainly when teaching C++ I wish the defaults were safer. I can teach ".at", but it isn't what you see in most code / tutorials.
In my recollection it dealt purely physical damage, and its inability to react with much of anything is what leads to its accumulation in dwellings.
Give us memory segments back and I think we have a shot of making this a reality.
Being sandboxed is good, however if one can start an internal fire from the outside, not so much.
Wasm's sandboxing makes it impossible to escalate the privilege of a program or acquire capabilities that it didn't have before (i.e. were not explicit imported and granted). That's a strictly stronger primitive than a random userspace Unix process.
You know what is also sandboxed? An OS process.
Ah, but an OS process has a wider syscalls surface, well lets than bring WASI or JavaScript bindings into the picture.
That's why.
Such crazyness, like why?