[Cryptography] Ada vs Rust vs safer C

Tom Mitchell mitch at niftyegg.com
Sun Sep 18 12:31:14 EDT 2016


On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Arnold Reinhold <agr at me.com> wrote:

> In the recent thread on safe erasure in C,  much was made of better
> languages including Ada and Rust. But there is a vast mount of code already
> written in C. Converting all of it or even a large fraction seems hopeless

.....


Not hopeless,
The problem is large yet calling convention for the  ABI of existing
compilers
allow incremental  functionality to be coded in a "better language".  To
start
GCC and CLANG use a common calling convention.

If the problem boils down to an ABI problem that can also be addressed.
We already have a mix of 32 and 64 bit objects on most systems.  With
good cause adding one or more with today's system memory resources
could be negotiated.

Example:
Those that use MPI (written in C) commonly use FORTRAN
for their working code.   Fortran well because the compiler
can optimize a lot of things safely.   The Message Passing Interface code
and process control is written mostly in C.   Not just fortran but Python
bindings and more exist.

So to start, code modules of interest in a "better" language
and use a common ABI link to the larger body of system code and libraries.
Over time one layer at a time replace the dependencies.

At thes end point C is left behind and the "better" tool chain
is responsible for the entire program.

It may take a couple starts to learn what a "better" language
and tool chain is.    Often the objections and advantages
are best understood when used for real so start.

Later,
mitch

PS:
  Yes FORTRAN=Fortran=fortran today.

-- 
  T o m    M i t c h e l l
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