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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

What is Apple doing about these non stop memory safety bugs? Google has put out a post about how they now write the majority of Android code in memory safe languages including 1.3 million lines of production Rust. While Apple hasn't said anything as far as I'm aware.

https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...

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In the kernel: https://security.apple.com/blog/towards-the-next-generation-...

In bootloaders: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/memory-safe-iboot-i...

I would love to see details of iBoot. How they built a memory safe bootloader with just "a modified C toolchain" is a pretty important detail. Did add they another language to the toolchain or add a special --memory-safe flag to a forked C compiler?

Annotations on top of C, compiled through their private fork of LLVM. Here's what it looks like on our side: https://saaramar.github.io/iBoot_firebloom/

Fascinating stuff!

Apple has, and is using, Swift.

There was an announcement recently that Foundation was moving to be written in Swift and not C/C++/Obj-C (I’m not sure how much of each it was).

This means a whole host of conversions and memory allocation and such will be in a safe language, underpinning everything.

Including Objective-C programs.

https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/

Majority of new Android code. Apple also has been writing parts of their operating system in a memory safe language, Swift.

Most new code at Apple is not written in Swift, just a small portion.

I actually think a lot of their new projects are written almost exclusively in Swift. There’s a lot of existing code that would need work to embed Swift into, though. (They’re working on it: https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/)

Well, given their WWDC 2022 announcement regarding Objective-C, and that Swift has surpassed C++ on iOS 16, things are starting to change.

What announcement?

No, google wrote a blog post about how they're moving their new code to safe languages. The vast majority of Google's code is in C/C++, and will be for the foreseeable future. The same is true for Apple - there's a huge amount of existing C/C++, and new code is increasingly being written in Swift.

That blog post was about Android, its use of Java, Kotlin and now Rust (since Android 12), mainly used to rewrite Bluetooth stack and the new virtualization framework in Android 13.

Any NDK user painfully knows how castrating the whole experience is, to access anything that doesn't have to do with graphics or real time audio.

That's exactly what I said with "they now write"

in that case you can look at the last series of years of WWDC with apple driving swift for developers, and swift's adoption by apple by increasing amounts of the OS. Which seems like the equivalent, only not in blog form.

Not terribly familiar with Swift but my understanding was it was more an app programming language. Is Swift suitable for writing OS code?

Yes, that is even mentioned on its official documentation, a replacement for C, Objective-C and C++.

Swift is a very powerful and robust language. I would expect that they keep going further down the stack with it but the problem will always be, "is it worth investing in a language refactoring on an existing codebase?". I presume all but the lowest level (or server-side) new code is in Swift at Apple nowadays.

I expect new code is being mostly written in Swift but there’s still lots of C, C++ and Objective C code that has to be maintained.

WebKit is a huge C++ codebase for example.

For this batch... most of the memory safety issues look to be in kernel code or adjacent, followed by Safari/Webkit. The Android Linux kernel is still pure C (for now), and I'm pretty sure new Chrome/Blink code is still primarily C++. The codebase as a whole certainly is…

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