Python is memory safe? Can’t you access/address memory with C bindings?

  • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    As someone who is in the aerospace industry and has dealt with safety critical code with NASA oversight, it’s a little disingenuous to pin NASA’s coding standards entirely on attempting to make things memory safe. It’s part of it, yeah, but it’s a very small part. There are a ton of other things that NASA is trying to protect for.

    Plus, Rust doesn’t solve the underlying problem that NASA is looking to prevent in banning the C++ standard library. Part of it is DO-178 compliance (or lack thereof) the other part is that dynamic memory has the potential to cause all sorts of problems on resource constrained embedded systems. Statically analyzing dynamic memory usage is virtually impossible, testing for it gets cost prohibitive real quick, it’s just easier to blanket statement ban the STL.

    Also, writing memory safe code honestly isn’t that hard. It just requires a different approach to problem solving, that just like any other design pattern, once you learn and get used to it, is easy.

    • arendjr@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Also, writing memory safe code honestly isn’t that hard. It just requires a different approach to problem solving, that just like any other design pattern, once you learn and get used to it, is easy.

      This statement is kinda ironic after you just said it’s “easier” to just ban the entire STL and dynamic memory allocation as a whole. You already left the domain of what most consider “easy” quite a while ago.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      I’d’ve thought Ada would play a larger role in aerospace, because of these issues, among others.

    • snowe@programming.devM
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      8 months ago

      Also, writing memory safe code honestly isn’t that hard. It just requires a different approach to problem solving, that just like any other design pattern, once you learn and get used to it, is easy.

      the CVE list would disagree with you.