[EsssM7QVMehFPAs]

A secure language is any strongly typed language that caters well to static analysis. Enterprise (and up to some point open-source) tools exist that are able to capture a vast range of security issues in code with the help of in-depth static analysis. I'd rather consider Java, .NET, C, or to a limited degree C++ as secure because of this.

Our compilers should long have included static analysis on par with optimization efforts, because - as you say - people tend to produce errors in code. Strong type systems and memory safety are a very nice first step though.

I am certain this will change over the years, but then the trend (that I am also prone to) is to go dynamic for the sake of productivity anyways.

[carlmr]

>any strongly typed language...I'd rather consider Java, .NET, C, or to a limited degree C++ as secure because of this.

Java, C# (not all .NET languages) are both quite strongly typed (it would be nice if there was no implicit toString conversion in C#, I think Java has this, too).

F# is a bit better than C# in terms of type system (especially exhaustive pattern matching on discriminated unions leads to a lot more potential type safety).

C or C++? They are happy to implicitly convert a lot of things, they're statically typed, but very weakly so. And in terms of memory safety C strings and arrays are the reason why static analysis is absolutely necessary here.

>Our compilers should long have included static analysis

The Rust compiler is doing a lot of what would be considered static analysis. And if you're dealing with normal strings and arrays you're not prone to C-like buffer overflow behavior. If you run in debug mode then you even get assertions on integer wrapping. This IMHO is also the biggest issue with C/C++. The fact that the compiler still allows so much to go through and only the static analyzer gives you a warning. Big companies rarely have code bases where most of the static analysis warnings are even solved. And it's hard to hire only "disciplined" programmers.

[blub]

"A secure language is any strongly typed language that caters well to static analysis".

Where is this definition coming from? Seems arbitrary.

Static tools capture the same old range of security issues which is only mostly relevant for C and to some extent to C++ and also Objective-C and unsafe Rust or unsafe Swift.

[UncleMeat]

The API matters enormously. Java is a strongly typed language that is reasonable amendable to static analysis.

Yet the javax crypto libraries are routinely misused. ECB defaults. People fucking up IVs. The whole shebang.