"The Safe C++ proposal, which sought to introduce a memory-safe subset of the language inspired by the guarantees found in newer languages like Rust, has been abandoned by its lead author. This development occurs as pressure mounts from government agencies and industry leaders to address critical vulnerabilities often found in legacy codebases, which form the backbone of global digital infrastructure."
"The initiative faced an uphill battle within the C++ standards committee, where achieving consensus for radical changes is notoriously difficult. Instead of fundamentally altering the language, the focus has now shifted to a "profiles" approach. This alternative, which is already in development for the C++26 standard, would allow developers to enforce specific safety rules through compiler flags. In practice, this means errors could be caught during the build process without changing the core syntax of the language itself,"
A proposal to create a memory-safe subset of C++ intended to protect against buffer overflows and dangling pointers was abandoned after being declared unworkable. Pressure from government agencies and industry highlighted the need to address critical vulnerabilities in legacy code that underpin global infrastructure. Widespread community resistance and strong concerns about preserving backward compatibility hindered consensus within the C++ standards committee. The effort has pivoted to a less disruptive "profiles" approach for C++26 that enforces specific safety rules via compiler flags, enabling build-time error detection without changing the language syntax.
Read at App Developer Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]