undefined | Better HN

0 pointscoder5434y ago0 comments

> feels like Java in terms of "how I avoid world-freezes by GC"

No… that’s not Go’s GC that you have experience with. I don’t know what language you used that you confused with Go. GC pauses in Go are notoriously tiny, since Go prioritizes consistently low latency. I’ve worked on many Go projects, and GC is not something that I worry about.

> Feels like C in terms of lack of templates

Are you seriously implying that C was not designed for large projects? That it was designed for tiny projects only? Because that’s not what history shows us, and C is used in massive projects like the Linux kernel. (Which causes innumerable CVEs related to human errors that C doesn’t attempt to prevent, unfortunately.)

It also doesn’t matter how fast you can churn out code if it’s Swiss cheese full of memory safety vulnerabilities. No one has ever pointed me to a popular C or C++ project that hasn’t been rife with vulnerabilities that would have been trivially avoided by using any memory safe language… so it’s a fair assumption that any C++ that you’re churning out has problems.

You mention Rust, and that’s a perfectly valid option if you have such a passionate hatred of garbage collectors. But, using C++ for a web service in 2021? No thanks. We need to be minimizing attack surface these days. (Memory safe languages can’t prevent all vulnerabilities, but neither do seatbelts. You should still wear a seatbelt when driving. Unbuckling doesn’t make the car go faster, and seatbelts do prevent certain classes of injuries.)

0 comments

sobakistodor4y ago

> No…

Yes. I don't need any micro-freezes.

> Are you seriously implying that C was not designed for large projects?

C was designed to move from asm to something highlevel. C made possible to write larger projects than in ASM. That's all. There is no absulute measurement of project size, only relative: larger->smaller. Go goes to "smaller" direction compared to C++.

All that arguments about safe/bugs etc is old. In modern C++ you write with no controlling memory allocation at all and you dont write your own arrays with can be overflown.

coder543OP4y ago

> All that arguments about safe/bugs etc is old. In modern C++ you write with no controlling memory allocation at all and you dont write your own arrays with can be overflown.

People say this, but they never point to any large, popular projects that demonstrate it.

If you write any serious project in Rust, you'll quickly realize how unsafe "modern" C++ is. There's just no comparison. I'm happy for people to pick whatever memory safe language meets their needs, and most of those are garbage collected. Garbage collectors are fine for most software, but Rust exists for situations where they aren't fine.

> C was designed to move from asm to something highlevel. C made possible to write larger projects than in ASM. That's all. There is no absulute measurement of project size, only relative: larger->smaller. Go goes to "smaller" direction compared to C++.

By your definition, everyone should be writing Haskell, because a single line of Haskell can take tens of lines of C++ to express the same code. Haskell is immensely powerful in this way.

masklinn4y ago

> In modern C++ you write with no controlling memory allocation at all and you dont write your own arrays with can be overflown.

The simplest and most straightforward way to access an std::vector item allows OOB read. Literally every smart pointer an be empty and will UB with no warning if deref'd in that state (that includes the brand new std::optional). The rules of X remain a tarpit lined with shit-smeared stakes, Chrome got bit by a GDI leak just a pair of years back because of that (a refactoring in an RAII object removed an operator= overload and started leaking GDI handles by the hundred when using chrome remote desktop).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse