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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

The entire compute world was built on top of C and C++. Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct. I think what you're really saying is they're not an optimal choice from a safety perspective.

> All of these need to be ported to Rust or another memory-safe language ASAP to prevent mayhem.

Seems like hyperbole... It might be ideal if we could snap our fingers and suddenly have rust ports, but I feel like you're discounting the effort that goes into doing that properly.

Which brings me to an interesting point. We have a web engine written in Rust. It's Servo. If the Rust port is so important to do as soon as possible to avoid mayhem, why aren't companies picking up Servo and using that?

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I assure you that Microsoft knew for years that there were thousands if not tens of thousands of memory related bugs lurking in Windows. But their policy was "don't fix" (and "don't look") unless a remotely exploitable vulnerability was making headlines. Because every minute a developer spends finding and fixing bugs is a minute he can't spend on adding new features customers will pay for.

Luckily one of the perks of A.I. is that it makes large scale code migrations feasible in a timely manner.

And I can assure you that there were a number of MS research developed tools for finding memory bugs that have been used for decades at MS. There was never a don’t look / don’t fix policy while I was there. Quite the contrary.

Was there ever a time, apart from the short monthlong stint in 2001 after Blaster, when Microsoft developers worked on fixing memory related bugs?

Automated tools (before the advent of A.I.) can only get you so far. The bugs being found by A.I. today could've been found by eyeballs if companies thought it worthwhile.

When these tools were set up, on every code change you had to run these tools and deal with the output of anything it thought was a memory bug - part of the dev cycle before you could commit your code.

Did you have to scan the code looking for memory bug yourself with your eyeballs too? Yes, at every code check in you went through a paired peer code review before checking code in no matter your dev level. So two sets of eyeballs would look at every change.

So yes, we had to look for bugs in multiple ways no matter the type of bug on every single code change.

Then the testers would run all these tools and look at the output too (I was there when each org still had SDE Testers).

Did bugs still get missed? Of course, just like today even with today's new tools.

> Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct.

I'll quite happily say they were never fit for purpose. C had a role in bootstrapping early software development in the absence of anything better but once Lisp, Delphi, Smalltalk and Java arrived on the scene then it, and its equally footgunnable variants, should have been pushed to the margins where hardware constraint was the primary consideration.

Writing a browser in C++ in the 21st century was ridiculous and irresponsible.

Ekhem. When Chrome was announced there wasnt Rust. And Java was a programming language for slow moving systems, with many a flaws and its own classes of footguns.

I dont think they had much of a choice in 2008. Now? Sure. I bet a rust port is in the works.

This is correct (I worked on chrome in 2008) it's important to remember that chrome's renderer was webkit, an existing c++ stack.

Chrome's stability innovation was to run different tabs in different processes, and the security innovation was then to sandbox those processes.

Rust would have been super nice but it wasn't an option then, and of course let's remember that Rust was developed by Mozilla specifically with the goal of making safer browsers.

You have chronology backwards. Lisp predates C by 14 odd years. Pascal was contemporaneous.

Well we make work with the tools we have

It worked well enough, maybe "fit for purpose" is a stronger word

Makes sense, but strangely, no one has responded to my question about why Servo hasn't been picked up, if Rust is such an important factor in browser engine implementation. People are calling using C and C++ "ridiculous" and "irresponsible" and "not fit for purpose". And yet, no one's using the alternative that's sitting right there?

Because Servo is unfinished, and companies have different priorities. For instance, Microsoft could've have been strict and formally checked code for Windows since the inception of constraint checkers, but they chose other priorities. Now they're are slowly trying to integrate Rust to help reduce security bugs.

You know what's funny?

Windows was built in C when "C was not guaranteed to win", hence why they have weird things like Pascal calling convention etc

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