[Not really OT] Crowdstrike Analysis: It was a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

[Paulo Pinto]

On Sunday, 28 July 2024 at 16:12:24 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 July 2024 at 14:25:14 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 7/26/24 16:59, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
>>>>
>>> 
>>> ....
>
> I think the difficulty is that D has its roots in C and C++, 
> both notably memory-unsafe. D adds the garbage collector to the 
> mix of stack- and manually-heap-allocated memory. Trying to 
> provide compiler-enforced guarantees in the face of these 
> disparate options is not a simple matter. Reading the "Function 
> Safety" section of the language reference made my head spin. I 
> think its complexity flows directly from the memory-management 
> options D provides.

Whereas the memory safe systems languages like Modula-3, Cedar, 
Oberon came from the safety first approach, and while these 
languages might not have taken over the world, their ideas are 
finally happening in Swift, C#, Java, Nim, Go, while D keeps 
debating how to solve the problem.

As hinted on my previous comment, they have been catching up on 
what D had as edge, and eventually whatever is left of that edge 
won't matter for further adoption.

>
> ...
>
> Note that Zig provides only stack- and manual heap-allocation. 
> It is not a memory-safe language. But there's a lot of interest 
> in it, despite not being close to release and a growing issue 
> list.

The interest in Zig, is it being Modula-2 with a revamped syntax 
for the C crowd, with compile time metaprogramming as cherry on 
top.

Turns out there is a crowd that would already be happy if C 
provided proper strings, arrays, strong typed enumerations, and 
less error prone memory management even if still manual, like 
Modula-2 was doing in 1978.

Since WG14 has proven that isn't something they want to improve C 
on, during the last 50 years, that is where that crowd is now 
moving on. SafeC, C2, C3 ideas never caught on, Zig might, lets 
see.