> Nobody with a sane mind would write C or CPP micro-services
why? I do this all the time. Maybe I should check into a nearby asylum.
why? I do this all the time. Maybe I should check into a nearby asylum.
...and that is flat out the case for c++, unequivocally.
In rust you’d expect it to be better, because of (reasons rust is good here, like safety, having a package manager and an ecosystem, etc etc), but practically, there are too many halfbaked solutions, too much ‘use nightly’ and few good stable proven solutions to look at.
Rust isn’t the right solution for every problem, but it should be a good solution for secure very high performance network services.
Its definitely a good goal for the year~
Arguably, this is why Google made go.
But I'm not sure c++ micro services are a terrible idea. I think the real problems come with a) feature creep as opposed to writing new micro services, and b) the temptation to write "fast" c++.
Just writing plain obvious c++ should give you a leg up on most languages (esp for micro services). But then, rather than refactor and think about the algorithm and data structures (and get a 10x performance benefit from a simpler solution), you could probably get a 2x improvement from a more convoluted, "special" c++ implementation.
And that's where you're likely to encounter elder horrors lurking.
[ed: I'm however more and more convinced there's no such thing as "plain obvious c" that doesn't have a number of serious issues along the lines of not checking mallloc return values, to utf8 string handling etc.]
It's quite common in the embedded space to use C or C++. It's easy to run everything as root and skip fundamental bound checking, so those languages get a bad rep in that space. Totally understandable. But it is possible to engineer solutions that are a lot safer too. It's just a question of priorities. Companies not prioritizing writing safe code or not working on having a safe architectural design will not bother with Rust or other memory safe languages. There's little to no market incentive in most areas. Sad but true.
A common theme in the C++ community is to advocate C++ to devs that only see Assembly and C89, and don't see any reason to move beyond that.
Most recent example "Embedded & C++ - Meeting 2017 Keynote"
But as far as using it as a full featured web framework, a la Rails, Django or even Laravel, I can see why people say it's got a long way to go.
That said, I haven't built anything production or large scale in Rust, so I can't claim to be an expert.
Software written in higher level languages is often less widely deployed, so less people are trying to find vulnerabilities. All the complexity adds up, and can result in new vulnerabilities that wouldn't have been there if the code was written in a simpler language.
Using a safer language makes it easier and less prone to out-of-bounds memory accesses.
By using C/C++ you're choosing to make a hard problem harder.
[1] shameless plug: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus
Oh and btw, "out of bounds memory accesses" are not the primary source of security vulnerabilities at all. In fact, such out of bounds access is more likely to just make your program crash (which is a good thing).
If you do, make sure it says "believes in micro-services" on the referral ;-)