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by Nokinside 20 days ago
Explain to someone like me who uses C in safety-critical software in aerospace and defense why not?

For me, choosing the language is not enough. It's the tooling that goes far beyond the language that is important for safety and quality of compiler and runtime. C has very mature tooling options. So does ADA.

https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm

Abstract Interpretation in a Nutshell https://www.di.ens.fr/~cousot/AI/IntroAbsInt.html

1 comments

Explain to us why you are not allowed to use 100% of ISO C, without certification processes that castrate C to the point it feels like Ada 83 with curly brackets.

Proceses that outside high integrity computing no one is willing to make themselves go through without legal requirements and liability.

Most of it because during 1980's it was cheaper to advocate for C plus certification than pay for Ada compilers and developers.

Because we want to write correct code. We want to verify the absence of many types of errors where amateurish language war stuff like Rust vs C does not even scratch the surface.

I would propose that we change your original statement "Ideally neither C nor C++ should be used when security matters." into:

"Ideally people who don't care about secrurity should not write code when security matters."

Can we agree that this is better than talking about programming languages?

Except security matters everywhere in modern computing, and the world is full of amateurs that call themselves engineers, writing C without any of those tools, or legal consequences.
If it mattered they would not be using C without any of those tools or techniques. Therefore, it is empirically proven that it either does not matter or they are deploying code unfit for purpose and should not be writing such code.

And that is precisely what they said:

> Ideally people who don't care about secrurity [sic] should not write code when security matters.

The absence of legal consequences further supports the fact that it does not matter.

There are always legal consequences, take a butchers...

https://www.google.com/search?q=any+case+law+to+defeat+this+...

It does certainly matter, it needed to go beyond what is acceptable for governments and security agencies to finally start reacting, since Morris worm came to be.

Naturally the move fast and break things culture sees it otherwise.