Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Tue Jan 09 2024 08:33 am

On 08 Jan 2024 at 09:32a, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni>   Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
 Ni>   By: tenser to Nightfox on Mon Jan 08 2024 04:06 pm
 Ni> 
 Ni>  te> They're still used quite a bit, but with memory safety coming up as a
 Ni>  te> issue, and for that matter with the US government starting to introdu
 Ni>  te> legislation to limit the use of memory unsafe languages in government
 Ni>  te> their use is likely to decline faster (at least as usually written).
 Ni> 
 Ni>  te> (And yes, Congress has recently introduced a bill directing the DoD t
 Ni>  te> come up with a plan to limit the use of memory unsafe languages like 
 Ni>  te> C++.)
 Ni> 
 Ni> Interesting..  For C++, there have been some new things introduced to the
 Ni> standard library to help with dynamic memory management.  Some such
 Ni> things are helper classes unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and similar, which
 Ni> manage a dynamically-allocated object for you (i.e., the memory will be
 Ni> freed when the helper object goes out of scope and it's the last to
 Ni> reference the memory, etc.).  I've even seen some C++ developers say
 Ni> they don't have to write a 'delete' statement anymore.

Heh, funny you should mention that....  I was just drafting
a post to a former colleague over on the WELL; he'd posted
a link to a video of a presentation Bjarne gave at CppCon a
month or so ago about safety and C++.

There are two issues at play, though.  1) backwards
compatibility with piles of existing C++ code.  That's not
going away any time soon, and means that while you can
make C++ code somewhat safer (and you should!) the rough
edges in the language that make e.g. memory safety
fundamentally unsound will remain.  2) someone still needs
to go back through the piles and piles of C++ code and
update it to use the safer features, which is not a small
undertaking.  Stroustrup has hopes for the Profiles thing
he's pushing; I wish him well.

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