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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, Swift uses reference counting instead of garbage collection which has different tradeoffs than GC but does incur a performance penalty.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I wish more languages used ref counting. Yes, you have to be careful of circular refs, but the tradeoff is simplicity, speed, lack of needing threads in the runtime, and predictability. Rust gives you special data structures for ref counting for a reason.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ref counting is just a very basic GC. I'd be surprised if a ref counted language performed better than a GC one. Sure, the program won't temporarily halt in order to run the GC, but every copy/destroy operation will be slower.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

When Apple introduced the iPhone they required automatic reference counting to be used in Objective-C rather than tracing garbage collection (the language supported both) due to performance reasons (iPhones were significantly slower than Macs). At least Apple seems to think that reference counting is faster than tracing garbage collectors. The compiler can do a lot to remove unnecessary releases and retains. Additionally each retain is just incrementing an integer, and each release is just decrementing an integer and comparing the integer to 0, so the overhead is pretty small.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

If the compiler optimizes away some RC then I see how it can be faster.