Posted on 02/28/2024 1:41:30 PM PST by yesthatjallen
The government would prefer it if you stopped programming tools in C or C++. In a new report, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) has called on developers to use "memory-safe programming languages," a category which excludes the popular languages. The advice is part of U.S. President Biden's Cybersecurity strategy and is a move to "secure the building blocks of cyberspace."
Memory safety refers to protection from bugs and vulnerabilities which deal with memory access. Buffer overflows and dangling pointers are examples of this. Java is considered a memory-safe language due to its runtime error detection checks. However, C and C++ both allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic with direct memory addresses and no bounds checking.
In 2019, Microsoft security engineers reported that around 70% of security vulnerabilities were caused by memory safety issues. Google reported the same figure in 2020, this time for bugs found in the Chromium browser.
" Experts have identified a few programming languages that both lack traits associated with memory safety and also have high proliferation across critical systems, such as C and C++," the report reads. "Choosing to use memory safe programming languages at the outset, as recommended by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA).
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at tomshardware.com ...
Wonder if C# is included in this warning. It works like C++ but has active memory management IIRC.
Really not that much difference between Fortran, Pascal and C these days.
I like Fortran for sentimental reasons but I prefer Pascal as it was developed as a Structured Programming Language from the gitgo.
C is a great programming language but I never really warmed up to it's quirks and it's syntactic weirdness that came about in the early days of it's development.
(Sound of grey_whiskers purring and drooling at the same time).
So, if the White House is suggesting Java over C++, is it ‘cause their own hacks can snoop on Java more easily than C++? Is C++ what the white hats are using, and the fascist goons in O’Biden’s regime are having trouble prying into their business?
Yep. All of the above. Plus.
Blessed are the Pascal programmers for they shall inherit their environment.
Real programmers like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it In the microwave oven. Real programmers use the heat given off
by the CPU. They can tell what job is running just by listening to the rate the corn Is popping.
I was there around '83-'84. Living at Wolf Creek apts. in Clear Lake, and going to the movies at Baybrook with my fellow nerds on Friday nights (I saw "The Right Stuff" there :) ).
Plenty of great nerds about. I often wonder what has become of them.
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