You're assuming that safety features will prevent security bugs. I think that is...optimistic at best.
Yes, they can defeat a few classes of exploits, but generally not the ones that lead to really bad outcomes.
Yes, they can defeat a few classes of exploits, but generally not the ones that lead to really bad outcomes.
> ~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues
Memory safety is a leading source of serious bugs in a big group of operating systems, browsers, image and file parsers, and more.
It does seem likely we can stop this, and it doesn’t seem likely to me we can fix it in C. We have tried and failed for years at that.
Hardware memory tagging, the language itself is beyond hope.
How is this not a win? We only have so many decisions we can make per day.
Unlike general purpose languages WUFFS has a very specific purpose (Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely) so it doesn't need to worry that it can't solve some of your problems, which frees it to completely refuse to do stuff that's unsafe, while going real, real fast.
WUFFS gets to completely omit bounds checks, which you probably wouldn't have dared try in C because it's so obviously unsafe, but WUFFS already proved at compile time that it can't ever have bounds misses so it needn't do these checks. WUFFS gets to also omit integer overflow checks, because again it proved at compile time that your code is correct and cannot overflow for any input. And since WUFFS knows how big the data is at all times it gets to automatically generate loop unrolling and suchlike accelerations.
WUFFS isn't a general purpose language, it doesn't have strings, it doesn't have growable arrays (what C++ calls "vectors"), it doesn't have any dynamic memory allocation, but then we weren't talking about how much you love general purpose features, we were talking about safety preventing security bugs. Which is exactly what WUFFS does.