Google is one of the biggest C++ shops out there, and also authors and maintains many of the static analysis tools and safety features you mention.
If they’re saying that C++ can’t be saved, maybe they’re worth listening to.
If they’re saying that C++ can’t be saved, maybe they’re worth listening to.
It might be true, but it also sounds like an appeal to authority. I suspect there also might be voices that are being silenced or aren't given a similar platform to speak up and provide an alternative viewpoint on the matter within the same organisation, because <team budget/political reasons why>. After all, there are greenfield projects that are being started in C++20 and people are enthusiastic about their prospects. I wouldn't just blindly dismiss their reasons in favour of Google ones.
That said, they won't catch a ton of memory and thread safety issues. You'll need tests with 100% coverage for that. Or you could just write it in rust and the compiler will catch it.
And full agree, all what cppcheck does imo should have long gone into the warning suite, and Werror and Wall should be the default..
If the authority comes along with a bunch of well researched and documented data from experiences in the real world… that seems worth listening to.
It’s no longer an appeal to authority. It’s just looking at evidence.
Modern C++ is indeed a huge upgrade on what came before and with a good amount of static and dynamic analysis the state of low-level programming is much better now, but there really is no reason for new programs to be written with these. Besides the bottom of the stack, managed languages are more than fast enough for nigh everything.
And yet, there is a lot of enthusiasm (at least here on HN) for web development in Rust...
Someone can think it's fine to write a web application in java/python/js and Rust.
It seems plausible that splashy projects in new languages are better for careers than grinding through "stable" codebases using "boring" engineering practices.
I also gather that Google has a challenge, possibly for similar reasons, keeping their third party dependencies updated and up to standards. A lot of those are written in C and C++, probably.
One of the people most involved in the systems described in the blog post that are used to harden the C++ side of things is a L9 here.
Designing the ultimate everything sanitizer with zero performance overhead would surely be impressive even at Google. Especially if it was actually adopted across the org.
And I assure you that, despite the memes, code health efforts do end up with promos here. The org responsible for third_party and large scale code health had above average promo rates for ages.
You’re merely reading what you want between the lines.
We continue to invest in tools to improve the safety of our C/C++. Over the past few releases we’ve introduced the Scudo hardened allocator, HWASAN, GWP-ASAN, and KFENCE on production Android devices. We’ve also increased our fuzzing coverage on our existing code base. Vulnerabilities found using these tools contributed both to prevention of vulnerabilities in new code as well as vulnerabilities found in old code that are included in the above evaluation. These are important tools, and critically important for our C/C++ code. However, these alone do not account for the large shift in vulnerabilities that we’re seeing, and other projects that have deployed these technologies have not seen a major shift in their vulnerability composition. We believe Android’s ongoing shift from memory-unsafe to memory-safe languages is a major factor.Google's one of the worst C++ shops because their code standard basically forbids using modern C++, and their C++ is more like 90s Java than modern C++. It's no wonder they want to get away from it.
I write C++ at Google, and it encourages use of modern C++ features, and many things you see adopted in std have roots in our libraries.
I'm curious what you think Google prevents us from using and why you think our C++ is like 90s Java.
https://abseil.io/tips has a lot of our philosophies and abseil is chunks of our internal libraries published externally.
I think it stems from the fact that Google was slow at making C++11 available internally so there was a period of time where the rest of the world was using smart pointers and we couldn't. That may have just solidified a "Google uses old C++" meme out in the wild despite it being wildly out of date.
Modern C++ has many memory safety features. If a company has learned that its people fail to use them, then bad for them.
Of course, there are languages that abstract memory safety to the point that they eliminate those types of mistakes. But languages are tools for a job, and only some tools are applicable where C++ is applicable. We should not bury C++ prematurely before answering the question - "what else is as fast and efficient as to replace it for OOP?" And if a project doesn't need fast and efficient code, then why is it using C or C++ in the first place?
Overall, selecting the correct tool for a job is more important than figuring out which tool is better in some abstract way.
This recapitulates an argument at least as old as C89. You can probably find Usenet posts deploying it to argue against the adoption of strncpy, because if people don't know how to use sizeof and strlen, then bad for them.
C++ nowadays can be used in a very memory-safe way without much effort. In my professional experience, memory leaks and corruptions are sporadic in modern C++ code and common in old-style pre-C++ 11 code.
That's why I'm a bit skeptical of this article from Google. It seems reasonable that Android has quite a lot of pre-C++ 11 code. And the article seems to lump two very different approaches to memory safety in pre and post-C++ 11 style programming.
Another approximation is to look at the Android source tree to see what proportion of it is as old as you assume in your argument. There are 431 results for a search `"Copyright 200" filepath:.\.cpp`. There are 7465 results for `"Copyright 201" filepath:.\.cpp`. 4152 results for `"Copyright 202" filepath:.\.cpp`. 220 for 2012, 354 for 2011. If you exclude tests the ratio is even less favorable for your theory.
In case you're wondering the project policy is to add a copyright header at the time the file is created, they do not update years in headers arbitrarily. As a spot check the first file matching "Copyright 200" that wasn't just essentially C code wrapped in extern "C" was: external/angle/src/libANGLE/Config.cpp. This file contains the use of std::make_pair.
You can perform these searches yourself here: https://cs.android.com/search?q=%22Copyright%20200%22%20file...
I've looked at many "Copyright 201" and "Copyright 202" headers. I needed to see more use of C++ 11 or equivalent smart pointers or containers to say that this codebase uses modern C++ memory safety features. Other modern C++ features (like std::make_pair that you mention) are easier to spot.
I expect this codebase to have many memory safety issues. It may not pass code review in a company/team that expects their people to use modern C++ memory safety features. After seeing it, I'm more convinced that the reason Google has so many problems with C++ in Android really is because they don't insist their engineers use modern C++ (or equivalent in-house containers/pointers).
Here's another insightful pair of searches:
" std::make_" filepath:.*\.cpp
"delete " filepath:.*\.cpp
The style guide, C++ readability, and general code review has all but banned raw "new" for years and years. You can find plenty of CVEs where the root cause is a UAF on a managed object.
Thanks for the context about UAF. I am curious about this. Much of my C++ experience comes from working with in-house reimplementations of std/stl, so my question might be a bit stupid, but how is use after freed of an obj managed by smart pointers so prevalent? Should the smart pointer not be nulled after the object is destroyed? Maybe you have a good example CVE? Are these cases of using the raw pointer in the smart pointer without checking it first?
I'm not sure what you are going for here.
The way this often happens is there is some module that owns an object with a unique_ptr and references to that object are used elsewhere. But the ownership of the object is complicated so a bug sneaks in where a non-owning reference to the object gets dereferenced after the unique_ptr is deleted. You can prevent this by having literally everything use shared_ptr for everything but that sucks for lots of reasons.
You can avoid multi-ownership problems of shared ptrs with weak pointer member variables (which only need to be turned into shared in a given {} scope). Some other problems can be solved by marking objects as pending kill without destroying them immediately and ensuring all threads finish access before actual deletion.
Unreal Engine uses both weak pointers and object marking in a global object array. It also uses GC but that's besides the point.
Would the same approach to modern memory management not help Android?
We've got like 30 years of people insisting that it really is possible to write safe C and C++ programs if you just follow the One True Way (TM) and its never been the case. Each new One True Way helps, but it sure as hell doesn't solve the problem altogether.
(And sure, it doesn't apply to every niche yet, but it sure applies to a lot of them)
And a good workman put his old/obsolete/dangerous/etc tool behind when something better show up.
The bad workman, instead, continue blaming his tools, when the problem is that he CONTINUE using bad tools, anyway!.
P.D: I learn about mechanical engineering. Get rid of bad tools fast is like key around that...
Are you serious? A bad workman blames his tools, because workmen are reponsible for their tools. A large part of being a good workman is identifying what tools are good and using them.
And C++ is a terrible tool for any task where you are not forced to use it because of existing libraries. All the memory safety features of modern C++ are a tiny, almost vanishingly small step in the right direction.
> "what else is as fast and efficient as to replace it for OOP?" And if a project doesn't need fast and efficient code, then why is it using C or C++ in the first place?
If you need fast and efficient code, why on earth would you be doing OOP?
As I said in the comment to which you are responding, "selecting the correct tool for a job is more important than figuring out which tool is better in some abstract way."
> C++ is a terrible tool for any task where you are not forced to use it
Many game developers, OS developers, and massive hardware-software makers doing embedded programming who use C++ would disagree. What would you say to them?
> If you need fast and efficient code, why on earth would you be doing OOP?
For small projects, I could agree. What would your recommended alternative be for massive codebases in large tech companies that need fast and efficient code?
P.S. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html about snarky comments. Thanks.
The poster wrote very clearly:
> where you are not forced to use it
If one is forced, there's obviously no option.
The idea is not that C/C++ should be replaced right now, rather, that devs finally understand that C/C++ should not be used where possible.
I actually see this pattern used by some, who defend C/++: "C/++" should be deprecated" - "No, it's impossible to eliminate C/++ today".
Deprecation is not elimination. Linux started introducing it, and Google is doing as well, so it can be done gradually.
>Are you serious? A bad workman blames his tools, because workmen are reponsible for their tools. A large part of being a good workman is identifying what tools are good and using them.
Also C/C++ made into real life tools would be OHSA violation on OHSA violation in real world
We have an answer: Rust. It's no longer premature, bury it.
See how many reference types are there, how async is handled and the underspecified unsafe semantic.
For higher level tasks, I prefer a language with GC like go or java. Rust can work with references counting, but it don’t mix well with the larger ecosystem. For lower level task, the underspecified unsafe model make it worse than C aliasing problem
2, & and &mut. What else?
I would love to know about any projects that do OOP well in Rust.
Concepts like sugar syntax and syntax salt do exist
Approaches to problems may vary by languages because lang environment shapes its users in some ways