"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens | Hacker News Reader

"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

xeiaso.net

27 pointstheshrike7917 comments

What this article is parodying, in case folk aren't familiar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

For those not in the know, Xe posts a version of this story everytime something like this happens (large scale memory safety failure), just like The Onion re-posts their similar article after every mass shooting in the US.

C++ is the only language where this happens? Highly doubt. It's probably because more applications are written in C++ than anything else, so it gets more visibility.

> It's probably because more applications are written in C++ than anything else

I imagine Java is as popular as C++ if not more. And C# is (or at least was) huge in Europe too.

"There really isn't anything we can do to prevent memory safety vulnerabilities from happening if the programmer doesn't want to write their code in a robust manner" is funny because it's hard to do it right even if you care. The way you do things right consistently is make it easier to do it right than do it wrong.

C++ inherited this from C, so there's at least two languages where this regularly happens.

I kinda wondered my my Windows 11 based work laptop had rebooted... I guess I should go check if it's still working right.

This was only mildly amusing the first time, and it doesn't improve with every repost.

Not familiar with the details, but page fault != segfault.

Ok satire and i fell for it. Nice.

What Linux calls a segmentation fault is actually almost always a page fault.

Nice biased article, I'm surprised they didn't mention Rust.

Rust is amazing tho... it has no memory problems and it is 100% memory safe.. very secure.

most security problems are not memory safety problems.

Ohh… didn’t realize that. Will email CISA to tell them to withdraw their monthly “switch to memory safe languages” bulletin.

That's because there is no systematic solution to the real problems.

There certainly are systematic solutions to at least _some_ of the real problems, based on formal methods, of which Rust's checkers are a simple example, and it's an inexcusable moral failure that they are not used more widely.

Reliable software is expensive to develop; more expensive than we are willing to admit. You can either take the expense at development time by increasing development cost, or you can shift it until later and externalise the cost by making the end-user and society at large suck it up in terms of unreliability and occasional disaster.

We are at the stage the Victorians were with exploding boilers, or people in early Medieval times were with collapsing cathedrals. They fixed their problems, and so can we.

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