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Comment by YZF | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that they use Go. I'd have thought most products in this space would be using C or C++.

Given their major competitor Fortigate had multiple exploitable buffer overflow vulnerabilities this year that's probably a good thing.

I wonder if it's a recent rewrite. My GlobalProtect on PAN-OS 11.0 is unusable after 11.0.2 with the entire company unable to connect. The latest release presumably fixed it, but Linux clients still unable to get a stable connection.

i share your pain. in my 20+ yrs working on enterprise infrastructure, i have never come across a more garbage product on so many levels on so many platforms at the same time as GlobalProtect.

How does it compare to Microsoft Teams?

Nice thing about Cisco AnyConnect and ASA firewalls is that they are rock solid.

It's still mostly C, with bits of Python, Go, and other common languages sprinkled around, plus more esoteric things for the platforms with ASICs or other specialized hardware.

And that in turn is all running on a nice layer of CentOS 6

I would see the use of a garbage collected C as an improvement, even if the language's design could be so much better.

Remember the evolution of UNIX at AT&T ended up on Inferno, not Plan 9.

Was your supposition because security appliance vendor track record in using generally insecure tech foundations, or that Go is too new?

It's just that I work in an adjacent area. It's not so much a question of security but of legacy, history, and performance. When Palo Alto was founded, 2005, I think C/C++ would basically be the only choice for these sorts of quasi-embedded/realtime high performance security applications. Then once you've built some sort of ecosystem around a certain technology introducing new technologies becomes harder.

Yes, I was imagining something like this for the "too new" alternative.

In 2005 you did already have safer, capable, mature systems programming languages available, eg Ocaml, but for cultural reasons they were not often used in SV. And people were less educated about building secure software (goes double for enterprise security products).

Caught me by surprise as well

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