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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

While it is great that this is happening, it seems a bit getting too late to the party.

There is also the whole issue that standard working group, and the folks that actually work on C and C++ compilers, nowadays it is a very thin Venn diagram for the intersection of both groups.

So it remains to be seen how much of this will actually land on compilers, and in what form.

Nevertheless there are many C++ written tools that most likely will never be rewritten into something else, so any improvement is welcomed.

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> too late to the party

And even if this would all be available today, you would need to wait 10 years for all third party libraries to catch up. Just look at the current rate of c++ version adoption. Many projects just migrated to c++17 this year, and that version is 8 years old by now...

Edit: Just used PCL that got updated from c++14 to 17, or look at https://vfxplatform.com/ where everything is c++17, and the list goes on....

According to Herb’s article most of this is already available in compilers

Partially.

In mainstream compilers. Most of these options aren't available in compilers e.g. for safety critical code.

Depending on how you look at it, that raises the question of "if this is so effective, and it's already available, why hasn't the situation improved?"

As many of us point out, even those that actually apreciate C++ despite its warts, safety culture or lack thereof.

Which I think it was much better back when it was C++ vs C in the C++ARM days, with great compiler provided frameworks, eventually past C++98 there seems to have been an inversion, as C++ graduality took over domains where C ruled.

The same mideset that will reach out for unsafe language constructs, regardless of the programming language, without any kind of profiler information, because of course it is faster and every μs counts.

  1. who says it hasn't?
  2. most of the vul code is C, which is obviously much harder to harden, and the Rust Evangelism Strike Force loves to pretend that C++ is the same as C, so no matter the improvements to C++, they will just point at C.
  3. I think many simply didn't know about these hardening modes, MSVC has had this for 10-15 years, but I still encounter people who don't know about it..somehow.

It hasn’t enough to satisfy industry or regulators.

As long as that C code is valid C++ code, it’s still a problem for C++. Backwards compatibility with C is a strength, but also a weakness. The Go and Java folks invested in rewriting dependencies in their own language to prevent problems, if C++ is truly that much safer than C, the C++ community could do the same, and demonstrate that it’s safer.

This is the power of opt out vs opt in. You can’t forget to run the borrow checker in Rust. That’s a practical, real-world advantage.

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