Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes, that's a valid argument, but if you think everybody will switch to Oberon any time soon, prepare to be disappointed.

In any case, LSSL can be a heck of a lot safer than OSSL, and, in fact, already is.



What about switching to Rust? https://github.com/ctz/rustls


Impressive, but I'm willing to bet nobody will want to rewrite all of open/libreSSL, one of the most popular cryptographic libraries out there, in Rust.


https://crates.io/crates/ring , which is BoringSSL, being ported over. Eventually it'll be Rust and asm.

(And is what rustls uses)


Well then, maybe. Consider me corrected.


Nice, thanks for point it out.


Oberon ship has sailed long time ago. I still like it, but that is just a nostalgia thing.

It was a great experience in the mid-90's, but a modern language in 2016 requires much more that what it offered, hence why I eventually got disappointed with Go's feature set.

I would rather see Ada, SPARK, Swift, Rust, ATS, Idris, F*, Formal Methods or whatever else that ensures that our code runs on top of solid foundations.


I'm not sure I entirely agree, but fair 'nuff.

In any case, my point still stands: People aren't going to rewrite all that C code. The best we can hope for is for some UB to actually be standardized, so that the sociopaths who write the compilers are reigned in a bit.


I very much doubt it, as it goes against the C culture of micro-optimize each code line as it is written, without any feedback from a profiler because "the coder knows best!".

Since I know C (1992), I have seen quite a few times people write code to go fast as they can and apply compiler optimization tricks for use cases where it hardly matters.

Also many of the issues regarding UB go back to the early ANSI C days, when it was the wild west of C dialects outside UNIX and no vendor wanted to give up on their own extensions.

As for C and C++ compiler writers view on UB:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG1OZ69H_-o


I know perfectly well what their views are. I did describe them as sociopaths, remember? UB, to some degree, might be resonable. C-style nasal-demon UB, with propogating conditions so that you can't check for integer overflows reasonably is possible to live with, but insane.

C's culture of hyper-optimization is ridiculous. Unfortunately, while Rust may well eat C++'s lunch, there's very little that is competitve with C at the same level of abstraction, so for some work (kernel development, perhaps, embedded systems, definately) it will remain significant for some time, if not outright dominant.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: