White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe

Depends on if you're coding for critical infrastructure (i.e. - electrical grid), or writing a high performance video game that can run on older hardware.

We should absolutely have specific licenses like Civil Engineers do for computer infrastructure that is required for any software written for specific purposes. It would be a nightmare to implement, but at some point, it's going to be needed.

writing a high performance video game that can run on older hardware
Unless it's some really exotic platform, I'd honestly still say no. Rust has shown that memory safety and performance doesn't have to be a tradeoff. You can have both.
But sure, if whatever you're targeting doesn't have a Rust compiler, then of course you have no choice. But those are extremely rare cases these days I'd say.
- There's always a trade-off. In rust's case, it's slow compile times and comparatively slower prototyping. I still make games in rust, but pretending there's no trade-off involved is wishful thinking
- Can we stop pretending Rust doesn't take performance trade-offs? Of course if you compare it one to one its roughly the same, since it's compiled. But Optimizing memory for cache hits becomes a lot more difficult in Rust, to the point where you have to use unsafe. And unsafe Rust has more undefined behavior than C. In my opinion C is more safe than unsafe Rust.
  If you want normal performance its a good Language, but once you need to Optimize memory, which is usually the bottleneck, You are out of luck.
- I don't even think we really need to eek out every MHz or clock cycle of performance these days unless your shipping code for a space vehicle or something (But that's an entirely different beast)
  We've got embedded devices shipping with 1GHz+ processors now
  It's just time to move on from C/C++, but some people just can't seem to let go.

let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things

🚩

- Oh, well of course that's fine. The government is talking about software that is used for important systems. No hacker will even know about your personal side project.

I'm just glad to see the White House listening to people who understand technology for a change.

We need legislators who aren't all literally older than cryptography. If they weren't bought and paid for by billionaires that would be nice too.
- That requires a population willing to vote for such legislators.
This admin honestly has been consistently doing so IMHO. Having read a memo that felt like a crock of shit yet, except for maybe the unfunded nature of some of the demands.
I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn't so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.
- You don't have to ban C or C++; you just have to prove your programs are memory safe. It's been decades since I've coded in C, but surely Valgrind and ilk are now capable of providing reasonable proof of memory safety. You might have to turn up all the dials and set all-warnings-are-errors, but I'd be surprised if C tooling wasn't available to provide sufficient proof for a given statically-linked program.

they don’t feel like your fighting the language

I really understand what you mean wrt Rust. I really do - I was there once. But it's a phase you grow out of. Not just that - the parts you fight now will eventually become your ally.

and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things

I had the same experience with C/C++. But as the design grows, you start hitting memory-safety bugs that are difficult to avoid while coding - even after you learn how those bugs arise in the first place. Just a lapse of concentration is enough to introduce such a bug (leaks, use-after-free, deadlocks, races, etc). I've heard that C++ got a bit better after the introduction of smart pointers and other safety features. But, it comes nowhere near the peace of mind you get with garbage collected languages.

That's where Rust's borrow checker and other safety measures kick in. The friction disappears when you acquire system knowledge - concepts of stack, heap, data segment, aliasing, ownership, mutation, etc. These knowledge are essential for C/C++ too. But the difference here is that Rust will actually tell you if you made a mistake. You don't get that with C/C++. The ultimate result is that when a Rust program compiles successfully, it almost always works as you expect it to (barring logical errors). You spend significantly less time debugging or worrying about your program misbehaving at runtime.

The 'friction' in Rust also helps in another way. Sometimes, you genuinely need to find a way out when the compiler complains. That happens when the language is too restrictive and incapable of doing what you need. You use things like unsafe, Rc and Refcell for that. However, most of the time, you can work around the problem that the compiler is indicating. In my experience, such 'workarounds' are actually redesigns or refactors that improve the structure of your code. I find myself designing the code best when I'm using Rust.

I do really like the error system in rust for its descriptions. I guess the difficulty for me, which maybe will go away after writing more rust, is that my intuition for what is efficient and what isn’t totally breaks down.
I find myself passing copies of values around and things like that, it might be that the compiler just takes care of that, or that I just don’t know how to do it well but that’s often the point of friction for me.
Totally agree on the refactor though, most of the time it doesn’t even take that much time since you know the skeleton of what you want at that point!
- I find myself passing copies of values around and things like that, it might be that the compiler just takes care of that,
  Rust prefers explicitness over magic. So it does what you tell it and doesn't just take care of that.
  If you're copying a lot of values around (I.e cloning. Not moving or borrowing), then you're definitely doing it inefficiently. But you don't have to worry too much about that. If there are too many difficulties in borrowing, it may be because those borrows are problematic with respect to memory safety. In such cases, sacrificing performance through cloning may be an acceptable compromise to preserve memory safety. In the end, you end up with the right balance of performance (through borrowing) and safety (through cloning). That balance is hard to achieve in C/C++ (lacking in safety) or in GC languages (lacking in performance).
  If that's the friction you're facing in Rust, then I would say that you're already in a good position and you're just trying too hard.

Leaders in Industry Support White House Call to Address Root Cause of Many of the Worst Cyber Attacks

And it's called C/C++. It's gotten so bad that even the friggin' white house has to make a press release about it. Think about it, the place where that majority barely even understand the difference between a file browser and a web browser is telling you to stop using C/C++. Hell, even the creator and maintainers of the language don't know how to make it memory safe. If that isn't a wake up call, then nothing ever will be.

And this isn't the first call! The IEEE also says more clearly: GTFO C/C++.

If you want memory-safe, don't write C/C++. Trying to get that shit memory-safe is a hassle and a half. You're better off learning a language that isn't full of foot-guns, gotchas, and undefined behavior.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You’re better off learning a language that isn’t full of foot-guns, gotchas, and undefined behavior.
As a JS developer, seeing this quote about C/C++ for a change gives me unbelievable levels of schadenfreude
~~If you want memory-safe,~~ don’t write C/C++.
Fixed that for you. There's no situation where you want buffer overruns.
- There's no situation where you want buffer overruns.
  I want buffer overruns in my game consoles for jailbreaking purposes lmfaoooooo
- If you don't want ~~memory-safe~~ buffer overruns, don’t write C/~~C++~~.
  Fixed further?
  It's perfectly possible to write C++ code that won't fall prey to buffer overruns. C is a lot harder. However yes it's far from memory safe, you can still do stupid things with pointers and freed memory if you want to.
  I'll admit as I grew up with C I still have a love for some of its oh so simple features like structs. For embedded work, give me a packed struct over complex serialization libraries any day.
  I tend to write a hybrid of the two languages for my own projects, and I'll be honest I've forgotten where exactly the line lies between them.

What memory-safe systems programming languages are out there, besides Rust?

Here are a few:
https://dlang.org/
https://ziglang.org/
https://odin-lang.org/
- Zig is better than C, but still a far stretch from the memory safety of Rust: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
- Also Swift!
Languages with GC
- I appreciate your answer, but I mentioned systems programming, because I was more interested in languages that do not rely on a garbage collector.
Wasn't Go designed to be a memory safe systems programming language? I haven't really used it enough to see if it holds true, though.
- Go is almost memory safe, but it does suffer from an issue with its thick pointers (type + address) that can cause race conditions to misrepresent the type of a data structure. This can lead to true segmentation faults and out of bound memory accesses, though it will probably be quite difficult (but not impossible) to exploit them.
I’m very flaky here, as rust is the big one, but I think zig and/or nim might be
- Zig is better than C, but still a far stretch from memory safe: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ I think Nim is better because it uses a garbage collector and doesn’t have any pointer arithmetic, but I couldn’t find as much on the topic.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.

Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that's much easier on the programmer.

And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible
The most manual way is what C does, which is requiring the programmer to check memory safety by themselves.😛
Also will say that outside of some corner cases, Rust is really not that harder than Java or Python. Even in the relatively rare cases that you run into lifetimes, you can usually clone your data (not ideal for performance usually but hey its what the GC language would often do anyway). And reliability is far better in Rust as well so you save a lot of time debugging. Compiles = it works most of the time.
- C# dev with reasonable experience with java, python, and rust:
  Rust is harder
- The most manual way is what C does, which is requiring the programmer to check memory safety by themselves.😛
  The difference is, Rust will throw a tantrum if you do things in an unsafe way. C/C++ won't even check. It'll just chug along.
  Rust is really not that harder than Java or Python.
  As someone who's done all three, the fuck it isn't.
  If you are familiar with C/C++ best practices to any operational level, those things will translate over to Rust quite nicely. If not, that learning curve is going to be fucking ridiculous with all the new concepts you have to juggle that you just don't with either Java or Python.
- I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally... but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.
  Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It's mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.
  I still think it's a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it's incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.
- Software engineer for almost two decades at this point, programming off and on since a kid in the late '80s: Rust is harder. It did seem to get better between versions and maybe it's easier now, but definitely harder than a lot of what I've worked in (which ranges Perl, PHP, C, C++, C#, Java, Groovy/Grails, Rust, js, typescript, various flavors of BASIC, and Go (and probably more I'm forgetting now but didn't work with much; I'm excluding bash/batch, DB stored procedures (though I worked on a billing system written almost entirely in them), etc.)
  That said, I don't think it's a bad thing and of course working in something makes you faster at it, but I do think it's harder, especially when first learning about (and fighting with) the borrow checker, dealing with lifetimes, etc.
  The availability of libraries, frameworks, tools, and documentation can also have a big impact on how long it takes to make something.
A better approach is the one Apple uses with Swift (and before that, Objective-C... though that wasn't memory safe).
In swift the compiler writes virtually all of your memory management code for you, and you can write a bit of code (or annotate things) for rare edge cases where you need memory management to do something other than the default behaviour.
There's no garbage collection, but 99.999% of your code looks exactly like a garbage collected language. And there's no performance penalty either... in fact it tends to be faster because compiler engineers are better at memory management than run of the mill coders.
- To be fair, Swift uses reference counting instead of garbage collection which has different tradeoffs than GC but does incur a performance penalty.
I'm no Rust expert, but in what I have done with it I've always found it reassuring to know the compiler has my back, and I haven't found the rules too onerous. In some ways I prefer this to counting on some black-box garbage collector with unpredictable performance costs, and I certainly prefer catching as many errors as possible at compile time not runtime.

So that's why I've been hearing non-stop crab rave music!

The interpreter or compiler could also introduce memory issues into the code. Much less likely to happen, but it is not unknown.

C++ can have excellent performance without ever using a single pointer and avoiding unsafe functions like gets() - this isn't necessarily a judgment on language - it's a judgement on bad programming habits.

Pointers fucking suck, in a modern C++ codebase everything should be pass by value or const/mutable ref. To my preference I'd rather drop mutable refs to force everything to be more functional but whatever.

I mean that's just the problem with C++. There's 17 different ways to do things, 2 are always wrong, 14 are contextual, and 1 is reserved for super special cases
- And the one you choose is always the one that's weak to the specific vulnerability you didn't think of!
Pointers suck in C++. In other languages every single variable is a pointer and it works perfectly with no memory bugs and great performance.
Pass by value often uses too much memory. Especially if you have a bunch of simultaneous functions/threads/etc that all need to access the same value at once. You can get away with it when your memory is a few dozen integers, but when you're working with gigabytes of media... you need pointers. Some of the code I work with has values so large they don't even fit in RAM at all, let alone two or three copies of them. Pass by value could mean writing a hundred gigabytes to swap.
- That's one reason I mentioned pass by reference "smart" languages will do it automatically depending on the size of the argument, some languages (including my beloved PHP) even have a copy-on-edit functionality where everything is technically passed as a mutable reference but as soon as you mutate it (unless it was explicitly marked as a mutable reference) it will copy the original object and have you edit the copy instead of the original.
  Is being explicit about when copies happen almost always a good thing - yea the overhead of that system is undesirable in performance sensitive situations - but for a high level scripting language it's quite nice.
Working with habits is just not good enough. C++ has far too many footguns to be considered a safe language and there are frankly objectively better modern alternatives that you should use instead, perhaps except if you have a really large legacy code base you can't replace (but even then, consider calling into it via FFI from a safe language).
Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.
C++ is not a viable language for the future.
- I get kinda bad vibes from this comment and I'd like to explain why...
  If somebody said "We're building a point of sale terminal and to make it secure we're going to be using C++" I'd probably have a dumbfounded expression on my face unless they immediately continued with "because there are libraries we can lean on to minimize the amount of code we need to write."
  C++ has an extremely mature ecosystem - Qt is essentially it's own language at this point! There are reasons to still consider building in C++ and saying "C++ is not a language for the future" feels dogmatic and cargo culty to me. Algol, Cobol and Fortran still have programming communities and while I agree that C++ is outsized in presence for the danger it presents there are still good reasons to choose it for some specific domains - high performance graphical programs being one of those in particular.
  C++ has a plethora of foot guns and you need to be aware of them but when you are they're easy to avoid in fact your quote:
  Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.
  Is probably the thing I agree most with - well built C++ isn't incompatible with regular ol' C++ but it feels like a different language... but as a not too old old-man-developer different projects often feel like different languages - each company/project has tools and libraries they use and it'll cause code written in the same language to read really differently... I'm a functionally oriented programmer with a pretty particular style, my C++, Python, Java, PHP, Node and Rust all look nearly the same except for language specific peculiarities.
  So yea, discipline is needed and nobody's default choice should be C++ but if you follow best practices your C++ can be quite safe.
  ... that all said... I fucking hate the concept of definition files being sseparate from code files so I'm not going to use C++ anytime soon.
just avoid all the bad stuff bro
If I was giving a tour of my kitchen and it included phrases such as "avoid using the leftmost cabinet of any set of two", "the freezer doesn't work but the fridge can be set to the same temperature", or "the oven has been deprecated, just use the microwave", you'd rightfully gtfo. Why is this acceptable of a programming language??
Even references aren’t safe in C++ though, since there’s no borrow checker. Unless you copy everything or use reference counting types everywhere, you’ll still hit plenty of memory-violating footguns. But at that point, why use C++ at all?
A big difference between rust and C++ is that in C++ you say "everyone should passing by value or const ref (mutable ref if needed)".
In rust, the default is passing by value. The default refs are consts, you have to explicitly make them mut, and the compiler will warn you if you don't mutate a mut parameter.

I'm learning c++ via exercism because I'd like to use it for game development and other high performance use cases, and because it's a good pip for the resume.

In fact, I mostly did this because so many job listings mention it, haven't even come up with a high-scale game dev problem to solve.

I'll probably continue because I find it interesting and no amount of practice is bad, but my question is how is everyone letting this affect their outlook on c++ in their career vs side projects, etc. Really, I'm having a hard time imagining why it was important for this to be said in this way instead of just changing internal policies and job listings.

I’m learning c++ via exercism because I’d like to use it for game development and other high performance use cases, and because it’s a good pip for the resume.
I think for game development you don't need to worry about a shortage of C++ opportunities any time soon. Both Unreal and Godot are built in C++ as well as many in-house engines. Similarly, there are other niches where C++ is king and it would decades for that to change.
That said, there are certainly areas where C++ is already being replaced by Rust. Areas where both performance and security are important are the first movers, such as webbrowsers, operating system components, but also things like high-frequency traders (crypto ones almost exclusively use Rust, while traditional ones will move slower).
Personally, I also used to be heavily invested in C++, but I'm happy to have moved to Rust myself. I recently became an independent contractor, and while I would be happy to take contracts involving C++ to migrate them to Rust, I would certainly not start new projects in C++ anymore. But for you, I wouldn't worry about that yet. The experience you gain working with C++ will help you appreciate Rust more down the line. Just keep in mind that at some point you will be likely to be exposed to Rust too.

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.
This is facile.
According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.
Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there's still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I'd rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%...
Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.
I've written quite a bit of Rust and a lot of C and C++ code. I'll take Rust over C or C++ for any task, including ones where memory safety isn't a concern. Yes, there's a learning curve, but overall it's just more pleasant to use. Now that I'm used to it, writing C++ code feels just as much like fighting the compiler as Rust ever did.
In cases where bugs have been counted they tended to make up the majority of vulnerabilities. Chrome, Firefox, and Windows reported that around 70% of security vulnerabilites were memory corruption. Yes a subset, but the majority of the worst subset.
You're in the wrong place if you want to pitch C over Rust 😅
Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had to deal with the scenario yet but does compile time really matter? I mean for small programs it seems it’s almost instant on modern machines and for large programs I would assume, if it exists, that you would be using the equivalent of make so you would only be recompiling the small changes made.
- Compile times are a barrier. How much of hurdle that really is depends on the project and dev. Like readability, accessabilty, friendlyness, license and userbase it all adds up to who can work on the project.
  I know in the DevX space the rule of the thumb is you want to have devs see results of a commit before the urge to check their phone/other tabs wins over because that context switching is timly for them.
Zig is a pretty interesting alternative to C
Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.
I guess? Are you alluding to someone or something in particular?
Bait used to be believable 🚬

I’m going to probably be downvoted to Hell, but I disagree wholly that it’s the language’s fault that people can exploit their programs. I’d say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.

I’d also blame businesses that emphasize quantity over quality, which then gets reflected in academia because schools are teaching to what they believe business wants in a programmer. So they’re just churning out lazy programmers who don’t know any better.

There needs to be an earnest revival of good programming as a whole; regardless of language, but also specifically to language. We also need to stop trying to churn out programmers in the shortest time possible. That’s doing no one any good.

That’s my two cents.

Id say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.
You are getting downvoted, because this is factually proven wrong by studies and internal analysis of several huge companies (e.g. google/android and microsoft). A huge number of exploitable bugs are preventable using memory safe languages, nowadays even without performance costs (Rust).
Apart from that your point is orthogonal to the point of the post. You can have better trained coders and have them use better, safer technologies.
We could also just train every driver more thoroughly including mental training and meditation to make sure they are more calm and focussed when driving and we maybe wouldn't need seatbelts anymore. But:
Is that a realistic scenario?
Why not use seatbelts anyway, so there's a higher chance of not dying if some driver didn't sleep well that day?
Gently, I would ask you to think about yourself in a future role where you have too little time, and are under too much pressure, and you haven't gotten enough sleep, and you're distracted on this particular day, and you happen to make a mistake, leave out a line, forget to fix a section of code you were experimenting with...
And even if you, a paragon of programming power and virtue, would never find yourself able to be hurt by your tools, you must surely know that mortals have to work with them as well, right?
Even the best programmers are going to make mistakes at times. Saying the solution is to just be perfect all the time is impossible.
Memory safety issues were a thing even before bootcamps and "bootcamp culture".
Even if you fix expertise, intention, and mindset - the entire workfield environment and it's people - mistakes still happen.
If you can categorically evade mistakes and security and safety issues, why would you not?
but I disagree wholly that it’s the language’s fault that people can exploit their programs. I’d say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.
Considering that even the best programmers in the world can't write correct programs with C/C++, it's wrong to absolve those languages of the massive level of memory safety bugs in them. The aforementioned best programmers don't lack the knowledge needed to write correct programs. But programmers are just humans and they make or miss serious bugs that they never intended. Having the computing power to catch such bugs and then not using it is the real mistake here. In fact, I would go one step further and say that it isn't the language's fault either. Such computing power didn't exist when these languages were conceived. Now that it does, the fault lies entirely with the crowd that still insist that there's nothing wrong with these old languages and that these new languages are a fad.
Heartbleed, that famous cve written by a bootcamp grad
All programmers make mistakes that cause memory safety errors if the language doesn't protect them. This is a well documented fact, not an opinion.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that we need to emphasize quality over quantity, so long as software pays well there will be people who don’t care. In my university I’ve met a fair few people that complain about having to learn about compilers, assembly, and whatnot because “I’ll never need to know that in my actual job”. While to some extent in the United States you can blame the fact that classes just cost a ton, I think it’s a sad reality that, barring some key change in the way our whole education and economic systems work, there will be unimaginative apathetic people that will ruin things for the rest. Plus people are fallible or something I dunno. But yeah void pointers are my jam because I don’t have to wait precious clock cycles making new ones jk.
Absolutely. The problem is, most programmers are mediocre. So sadly the protection of stupid people tends to take cultural precedence.
- Please show me a single "good" programmer who is working with C/C++ and hasn't had a single memory bugs in a decade.

Oh yes, improve security by mandating that everyone uses higher level languages that encourage importing libraries.

I hate to pull the AI card, but AI has a better chance of catching low level language type issues than forcing people to use tools they didn't want to has of accomplishing anything positive.

Yeah let's audit code using heuristic tools, after all safety is just about probabilities in the first place!
Sboms, and supply chain security are also being pushed