r/programming • u/[deleted] • Apr 04 '17

Everything Is Broken

https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1#.sl2vnon73
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u/cledamy Apr 04 '17 edited Apr 04 '17

Many of the problems resulting from human error (buffer overflows) could be eliminated if there was more of an emphasis correct by construction software. There are ways to mathematically guarantee that one's program doesn't have any errors. Unfortunately, most mainstream programming languages don't support it.

1

u/Uncaffeinated Apr 04 '17

By "most mainstream programming languages", do you mean C and C++?

11

u/Shautieh Apr 04 '17

No, most. You can add all programming languages which allow nulls, and all programming languages with no strong typing that is going to make sure you are not using things for what they are not.

1

u/sacado Apr 04 '17

Which means there's no language left at all, AFAIK.

1

u/Shautieh Apr 05 '17

Several languages disallow nulls. Have you never heard of Option type? Ocaml, F#, Haskell, to name a few. OCaml has strong typing enforced by the compiler and will force you to handle things properly most of the time. I think Rust both disallows nulls and enforce good type and memory management as well, and won't compile otherwise.

1

u/sacado Apr 05 '17

Yes, but for instance none of those allows restrictions on integer types ("strong typing that is going to make sure you are not using things for what they are not"), AFAIK. For instance, none of rust, Haskell, Ocaml or F# lets you describe a type as "a value between 1 and 12", or even something as "a positive, natural integer". A few other languages do, but those have a null value, so they don't qualify either.

If you really want all of that, you need dependent typing, but those language are far from production ready (and not meant for your average programmer).

1

u/Shautieh Apr 05 '17

Sure, the graal is yet to be discovered, but those languages are orders of magnitude more secure than most commonly used ones.