If you could reliably write memory safe code in C++, why do devs put memory safety issues intontheir code bases then?

Even highly paid (and probably skilled) devs in the IT industry manage to mess that up pretty regularly. Even if it was: devs using memory safe languages make much fewer mistakes wrt. managing memory… so that tooling does seem to help them at least more than the C++ tooling helps the C++ devs.

I’d go for open source projects. They usually have bigger code bases and good practices, that they enforce on their contributors with code reviews and such.

It’s a good way to get feedback on your code, something miss out on personal projects and get much less of in university and corporate projects.

Github login does not help much… devs are on github, not on random forgjo instances. That’s where they see your project. Github is also where they put their fork of your project when they play with it. They will write comments using github markdown and won’t care whether that renders correctly or not in your forge.

And it is where they will report issues and open a PR. It is annoying, but it is how it is. When you ask them to open the PR elsewhere they complain sinde they need to set up an account there and copy ssh key and similar things. You need a very dedicated contributor to go through with all that… especially if it is just a few lines of drive-by fixes.

The biggest factor to me is developer attention. I had a project on gitlab and pushed a README.md with a link to the gitlab instance into github. I got about 10 times more reactions from github, incl. PRs (where the person had grabbed the code from gitlab and did a PR on github anyway) – even in this setup. Mirroring a project to github tilts that even further.

Not being present on github means a lot less users and contributors. As long as that stays this way there is no way around github.

I hope federated forges can move some attention away from github, making other forges more visible… but I am not too optimistic :-(

The blocking certain countries is a US legal thing. It effects any forge in the US and probably in more areas close to the US. As soon as a forge gets big enough to show up on the radar of government orge they will need to do similar blocking.

You can not really blame github for that part.

“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,”

My impression is that they are very aware of the state of C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees. That’s why they keep raising the pressure.

That depends a lot on how you define “correct C”.

It is harder to write rust code than C code that the compiler will accept. It is IMHO easier to write rust code than to write correct C code, in the sense it only uses well defined constructs defined in the C standard.

The difference is that the rust compiler is much stricter, so you need to know a lot about details in the memory model, etc. to get your code past the compiler. In C you need the same knowledge to debug the program later.

That depends on how you decide which bucket something gets thrown into.

The C++ community values things like the RAII and other features that developers can use to prevent classes of bugs. When that is you yard-stick, then C and C++ are not in one bucket.

These papers are about memory safety guarantees and not much else. C and C++ are firmly in the same bucket according to this metric. So they get grouped together in these papers.

There is no regulation at this time. There may not be regulation ever. Before there is any regulation we will see nudging into the “right” direction. Suggesting that companies define a memory safety roadmap could be considered as the very first nudge, or maybe not:-)

All I wanted to say is that ignoring the possibility of regulation in such a text seems a bit short-sighted to me.

Governments triggered this entire discussion with their papers and plans to strengthen cyber defenses. The article states that some experts ask for our industry to be more regulated in this regard.

I am surprised that possible regulations are not even listed as a factor that in the decission to stay with C++ or move to something else.

Sure, COBOL is still around after decades, but nobody ever tried to pressure banks into replaceing that technology AFAICT.

The quote above covered exactly what you just said: “yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group” at work :-)

To be fair: snaps can work for all kinds of things all over the stack from the kernel to individual applications, while flatpak just does applications. Canonical is building a lot around those abilities to handle lower level things, so I guess it makes sense for them.

IMHO flatpak does the applications better and more reliably and those are what I personally care for, so I personally stay away from snaps.

I am looking forward to follow up articles like “woodworking as a career isent right for me”, “bookkeeping as a career isent right for me” and the really enlightening “any job sucks when your boss is shit”.

It is damn hard to write tooling for C++ projects: There are no standard ways to do anything, so you need to add lots of options just to cover a range of project configurations. Those add a lot of complexity very fast, which is unrelated to the actual task you want to solve.

The problem is that you lose out on dev attention when moving away from github.

I moved my projects into github when placeholder projects literally containing a README with a link to the real repo only got way more interaction on github than in the real repository: More stars, more views, more issue reports and even more PRs (where the devs have obviously Cloned the repo from the actual repository but could not be arsed to push there as well).

If you want your project to be visible, it needs to be on github at this point in time:-(

supply chain attacks are a serious problem that needs addressing.

Last I checked: I am not a supplier. So I will not invest effort to secure some supply chain for people that I do not have any obligations to: The license clearly states “no warranty” for a reason. I do those projects for fun, not to bother me with security stuff, notifications about security problems some automatic thing “found” that do not really effect my code and bogus merge requests to upgrade dependencies for no reason… this are all cool things if you are a supplier, do not get me wrong, but I am not. No, I will not invest hours of my free time to sign binaries nobody uses either or to fill out security surveys for badges I can display on github.

If you want me to act like a supplier: Pay me like all the other suppliers you have. I doubt there is any interest to do so for the projects I have on my private github :-)

For your own projects, it might be worth considering a move away from GitHub. (I’ve been thinking about it since Microsoft bought them.) Codeberg looks like a good alternative.

That also has associated costs: Your project gets instantly much less visible, so you need to keep a mirror on github for visibility. Unfortunately that also means that you will also get interactions on github, so you will need to log in occasionally to not make people think the project is dead.

A basic TableView was added a while back.#2033 tracks more features we want to add later.

Any help with implementing these features is.welcome:-)

We can always use a UX person over at https://github.com/slint-ui/slint :-) Slint is a UI toolkit written in rust, but the UI is defined in a simple custom language that is really easy to pick up.

You could polish up existing demos, to create new ones and could even come up with new widgets.

We try to be a nice community, feel free to drop by and chat if you have questions in our mattermost instance hosted at https://chat.slint.dev/

What is actually meassured there? “Line goes down” is not necessary a bad thing:-)

What do you mean by “system support”? The system is mostly pushing bytes along, the programming languages/UI ovaries tend to do all the hard work. So it is usually more interesting to see what those support.