C++ Creator Rebuts White House Warning

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup has defended the widely used programming language in response to a Biden administration report that calls on developers to use memory-safe languages and avoid using vulnerable ones such as C++ and C. In a March 15 response to an inquiry from InfoWorld, Stroustrup pointed out strengths of C++, which was designed in 1979. 'I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees,' Stroustrup said. 'On the other hand, they seem to have realized that a programming language is just one part of a tool chain, so that improved tools and development processes are essential.'

Safety improvement always has been a goal of C++ development efforts, Stroustrup stressed. 'Improving safety has been an aim of C++ from day one and throughout its evolution. Just compare the K&R C language with the earliest C++, and the early C++ with contemporary C++. My CppCon 2023 keynote outlines that evolution,' he said. 'Much quality C++ is written using techniques based on RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), containers, and resource management pointers rather than conventional C-style pointer messes.' Stroustrup cited a number of efforts to improve C++ safety. 'There are two problems related to safety. Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples' notions of which aspects of safety are important differ. I and the C++ standard committee are trying to deal with that,' he said. 'Profiles is a framework for specifying what guarantees a piece of code requires and enable implementations to verify them. There are documents describing that on the committee's website -- look for WG21 -- and more are coming. However, some of us are not in a mood to wait for the committee's necessarily slow progress.'

Profiles, Stroustrup said, 'is a framework that allows us to incrementally improve guarantees -- e.g., to eliminate most range errors relatively soon -- and to gradually introduce guarantees into large code bases through local static analysis and minimal run-time checks. My long-term aim for C++ is and has been for C++ to offer type and resource safety when and where needed. Maybe the current push for memory safety -- a subset of the guarantees I want -- will prove helpful to my efforts, which are shared by many in the C++ standards committee.' Stroustrup previously defended the safety of C++ against the NSA, which recommended using memory-safe languages instead of C++ and C in a November 2022 bulletin.

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