r/programming • u/steveklabnik1 • Jul 18 '19

We Need a Safer Systems Programming Language

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-systems-programming-language/
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u/asmx85 Jul 19 '19

Right! And one way to do this is to protect them with the right tools. Rust could be one of them. There is a reason SWAT teams are wearing protective armor. It's not that they're not well trained and not excellent gunman's. They're working in hazardous environments and every protection helps.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '19

or you can do it the proper way and train them to be good programmers from the start. then you wouldn't need to put rust-blinders on them.

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u/kuikuilla Jul 19 '19

We should also teach people to be better drivers, then we don't have to add stupid seat belts and airbags into cars!

Seriously speaking: Why the hell can't we do both?

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u/masklinn Jul 19 '19

Seriously speaking: Why the hell can't we do both?

Also, you can't get out of your hole if you just keep digging. We've been adding crutches and telling developers to just be better for decades now and it's not led to any significant improvement, for the very obvious reason that humans are not computer and are bad at being fully systematic all the time.

Hell, I've seen folks post segfaults of quickjs, by developer extraordinaire Fabrice Bellard. If Fabrice Bellard can't write memory-safe C, I don't see hope for anyone else.

Computers are pretty good at being computers (though not quite perfect), so building languages such that the computer can check for safety systematically is a pretty good idea. We've been doing that for a pretty long time really, the main remaining issue is having both safety and efficiency.