writing a high performance video game that can run on older hardware

Unless it's some really exotic platform, I'd honestly still say no. Rust has shown that memory safety and performance doesn't have to be a tradeoff. You can have both.

But sure, if whatever you're targeting doesn't have a Rust compiler, then of course you have no choice. But those are extremely rare cases these days I'd say.

We need legislators who aren't all literally older than cryptography. If they weren't bought and paid for by billionaires that would be nice too.

~~If you want memory-safe,~~ don’t write C/C++.

Fixed that for you. There's no situation where you want buffer overruns.

You’re better off learning a language that isn’t full of foot-guns, gotchas, and undefined behavior.

As a JS developer, seeing this quote about C/C++ for a change gives me unbelievable levels of schadenfreude

Here are a few:

https://dlang.org/

https://ziglang.org/

https://odin-lang.org/

Gently, I would ask you to think about yourself in a future role where you have too little time, and are under too much pressure, and you haven't gotten enough sleep, and you're distracted on this particular day, and you happen to make a mistake, leave out a line, forget to fix a section of code you were experimenting with...

And even if you, a paragon of programming power and virtue, would never find yourself able to be hurt by your tools, you must surely know that mortals have to work with them as well, right?

Id say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.

You are getting downvoted, because this is factually proven wrong by studies and internal analysis of several huge companies (e.g. google/android and microsoft). A huge number of exploitable bugs are preventable using memory safe languages, nowadays even without performance costs (Rust).

Apart from that your point is orthogonal to the point of the post. You can have better trained coders and have them use better, safer technologies.

We could also just train every driver more thoroughly including mental training and meditation to make sure they are more calm and focussed when driving and we maybe wouldn't need seatbelts anymore. But:

1. Is that a realistic scenario?
2. Why not use seatbelts anyway, so there's a higher chance of not dying if some driver didn't sleep well that day?

Even the best programmers are going to make mistakes at times. Saying the solution is to just be perfect all the time is impossible.

Memory safety issues were a thing even before bootcamps and "bootcamp culture".

Even if you fix expertise, intention, and mindset - the entire workfield environment and it's people - mistakes still happen.

If you can categorically evade mistakes and security and safety issues, why would you not?

but I disagree wholly that it’s the language’s fault that people can exploit their programs. I’d say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.

Considering that even the best programmers in the world can't write correct programs with C/C++, it's wrong to absolve those languages of the massive level of memory safety bugs in them. The aforementioned best programmers don't lack the knowledge needed to write correct programs. But programmers are just humans and they make or miss serious bugs that they never intended. Having the computing power to catch such bugs and then not using it is the real mistake here. In fact, I would go one step further and say that it isn't the language's fault either. Such computing power didn't exist when these languages were conceived. Now that it does, the fault lies entirely with the crowd that still insist that there's nothing wrong with these old languages and that these new languages are a fad.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible

The most manual way is what C does, which is requiring the programmer to check memory safety by themselves.😛

Also will say that outside of some corner cases, Rust is really not that harder than Java or Python. Even in the relatively rare cases that you run into lifetimes, you can usually clone your data (not ideal for performance usually but hey its what the GC language would often do anyway). And reliability is far better in Rust as well so you save a lot of time debugging. Compiles = it works most of the time.

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.

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

This is facile.

According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.

Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there's still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I'd rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%...

Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.

I mean that's just the problem with C++. There's 17 different ways to do things, 2 are always wrong, 14 are contextual, and 1 is reserved for super special cases

Working with habits is just not good enough. C++ has far too many footguns to be considered a safe language and there are frankly objectively better modern alternatives that you should use instead, perhaps except if you have a really large legacy code base you can't replace (but even then, consider calling into it via FFI from a safe language).

Even if you tried to actually enforce these habits, you'd just end up inventing a new language and it would be incompatible with previous C++ too.

C++ is not a viable language for the future.

Pointers suck in C++. In other languages every single variable is a pointer and it works perfectly with no memory bugs and great performance.

Pass by value often uses too much memory. Especially if you have a bunch of simultaneous functions/threads/etc that all need to access the same value at once. You can get away with it when your memory is a few dozen integers, but when you're working with gigabytes of media... you need pointers. Some of the code I work with has values so large they don't even fit in RAM at all, let alone two or three copies of them. Pass by value could mean writing a hundred gigabytes to swap.