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Comment by mambodog | Hacker News Reader

It does seem like if your goal was security than perhaps Rust would be a better choice.

Rust won't help you on the dozens of platforms it isn't available.

If your goal is security literally any high level language is a better choice.

High level language like php ? Security and secure code is a mindset. You code without thinking that bad things will happen, you will get bitten.

Sure high level language can help with memory management... but plenty of CVE are because of sloppy coding, not because of low level language.

While you are correct in that picking a higher level language doesn't shield you from writing insecure code, insecure C/C++ failure modes are usually quite a bit worse than other languages used for that purpose. I don't trust myself to write code that handles memory 100% correctly and is also network-facing. If much better developers than I manage to screw that up, what chance do I have?

Mmm, it can be difficult to take advantage from C exploits (in the context of a webserver). On a well written C system, you might expect most bugs to lead to crashes.

PHP bugs tend to be more exploitable, because you're doing something supported by the language.

But what's stopping someone from writing an app-level vulnerability in C vs any other language? Most of them are because of horrible handling of strings, which is something C is also not that great at. I'm not seeing the security benefit here.

My gut feeling is that if you really want security in C, you have fewer constructs to misuse and so you get less unexpected behaviour. At the same time, you get more protection mechanisms; guard pages etc. I.e. harder to be secure, but if you really want to harden, you can get harder than in higher level languages.

I'm not putting any kind of weight behind that, though; I just feel that it's a bit odd for people (not specifically meaning you, just the whole thread) to criticise this purely on language choice and not put any substance behind their criticisms that actually relate to the software in question.

I think the idea still stands. PHP is a fake high level language in my opinion.

A high level language should reduce boilerplate and 'force' you to write concise and predictable code.

PHP does none of that especially in the context of error/exception handling.

None of your standards for what a high-level language should be have any bearing on what a high-level language is, according to the definition that people actually use, and those standards might exclude Python, Ruby, C++ and Java among others.

Actually yes. For security, even PHP is a better choice than C (for certain versions of the idea of "security"). There's entire classes of security problems that are literally impossible in PHP.

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