Are programs/OSes written in D more secure than programs written in C/C++?

Paulo Pinto pjmlp at progtools.org
Thu Jun 7 02:22:37 PDT 2012


On Wednesday, 6 June 2012 at 23:10:54 UTC, Justin Whear wrote:
> On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 01:01:55 +0200, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>
>> On 07-06-2012 00:04, J.Varghese wrote:
>>> I'm not a programmer, so can someone explain this to me: Will 
>>> programs
>>> and operating systems written in D be safer (I speak of both 
>>> memory
>>> safety and security bugs) than existing operating systems 
>>> written in C
>>> and C++? If so, what features and attributes of D make this 
>>> the case?
>>> How much safer is it? Would it be possible to identify all 
>>> the bugs in
>>> an OS written in D (within a reasonable timeframe) or is that 
>>> still a
>>> pipedream?
>>>
>>> Thanks for replying. I have followed the development of D for 
>>> a while.
>>> I just want to know how much safer D is than other languages. 
>>> Curiosity
>>> and all that.
>> 
>> No programming language (today) can make cryptosystems more or 
>> less
>> mathematically secure. ...
>> 
>> So what D does is that it prevents small but common exploits in
>> programs. But that doesn't mean that your program is 
>> cryptographically
>> sound/secure, for example.
>> 
>> As always, It Depends (TM). :)
>
> I'd add to this list a philosophy decision: D tries to make the 
> correct
> way the easiest way and path of least resistance. A highly 
> disciplined
> and skilled C coder could accomplish the effect, but practically
> speaking, this can help eliminate a class of errors due to 
> programmer
> laziness or lack of understanding.
>
> Justin

The problem is that "skilled C coders" are very hard to find.

The company I work for does consultancy in JVM and .NET 
environments, and I cry every time I do code review in languages 
that are supposedly easy to master.

I cannot even imagine the type of code many of our developers 
would write in C or C++.


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