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Comment by 0xParlay | Hacker News Reader

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This is a needlessly aggressive take IMO, and hailing Rust as the be-all and end-all for secure software lacks nuance, giving the language and its adherents a bad reputation.

Until governments give an helping hand, it is going to take a while.

However we are going into the right direction.

Microsoft also has put this into place for all those codebases that aren't being rewritten any time soon,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/code-quality/build-rel...

Who do you nominate as the arbiter of what qualifies as critical software?

Rust is not the only memory-safe language (not even the first).

There are more "safe" languages than rust, especially if it's only "critical" software, not drivers.

Downvotes of course. Programmers like to think they can write secure code with no guardrails. The fact that CVE lists are full of memory errors in 2023 says otherwise.

Even if you can write secure code in unsafe languages, it’s still a problem. Bugs creep in over time as more people work on a project, changes are merged, it’s ported to other platforms, etc.

If your project has any longevity you can’t bet on your pristine C code staying pristine.

There are more safe languages than Rust though.

We simply don't appreciate other people imposing their will on us. We should be able to start a C project in 2023 without shame if we want to. Simply because we like C and don't like Rust. There's literally no need to justify it any further. We are free to do what we want.

If in doubt, remember: the software is distributed in the hopes it will be useful but with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.

There's a substantial difference between a hobbyist writing a random project in C, and Google writing an image processing implementation, and then including it in Chrome and Android.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. You can start your project in C and release it on an AS IS basis, and we can make fun of you for it, object to its use in professional contexts, and so on.

> we can make fun of you for it

Don't complain about the downvotes or the well-deserved replies then.

> object to its use in professional contexts

Liability limitation is standard legal boilerplate in literally every free software and open source license. No doubt it's also present in the terms of service documents which nobody reads before accepting. If you're gonna object to using software based on that, you might find you'll have to rewrite all of it or pay top dollar for service level agreements.

What's the mechanism for imposing their will?

And how is the limitation of LEGAL liability relevant in the realm of moral one (shame etc)

> And how is the limitation of LEGAL liability relevant

It sure as hell matters when a guy comes here posting about how C programmers need to be sued for negligence. Can you imagine some asshole suing you because you started a project on GitHub but didn't use one of the approved languages?

Oh, sorry, the original comment was flagged, so didn't see the legal threat, so only made the connection between statements in your comment

No worries, in a couple of years you will be able to get goverment clearance for C, in similar way companies have to when dealing with hazardous substances.

Downvotes because we are tired of the rust spam.

I've been in tech for ages and I hate fads, and consider myself decent at spotting them. I was skeptical when I first started seeing Rust stuff but then I tried the language.

Definitely not a fad. It's a real innovation. Not the best language ever for language nerds / purists, but it brings a lot of important innovations down into the realm of the practical stuff you can easily use for real projects.

The only way it's going away is if something dramatically superior appears. Language design is very very hard and most "advanced" languages are impractical for real world use for various reasons, so I am not holding my breath.

The other newish language I like is Go, but for different use cases. Has a different design philosophy and imposes less cognitive load, but it's also designed for a different niche.

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