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The White House's Fleeting Endorsement of Memory-Safe Languages
Security Post #6512 · source on Telegram

The White House's Fleeting Endorsement of Memory-Safe Languages

Description

A screenshot of a Reddit post from the r/rust subreddit, titled 'Whitehouse press release "Future software should be memory safe" is taken down'. The post, flaired as 'news', expresses the user's confusion upon discovering that an official White House report advocating for memory-safe programming languages has been removed from the website. The user questions the implications for Rust and similar languages. To aid others, the post includes the original, now-broken whitehouse.gov URL and a working link to an archived version of the report on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The technical relevance and humor come from the sudden, unexplained disappearance of a significant government endorsement for modern, memory-safe languages like Rust. For senior developers, this sparks immediate speculation about industry lobbying (e.g., from proponents of C/C++), political maneuvering, or simple bureaucratic incompetence, turning a piece of tech policy news into a minor conspiracy

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Security Languages DevCommunities IndustryTrends Hype

Common Tags

RustLanguageFeatures SecureCodingPractices MemoryManagement Security SecurityBestPractices

Comments

50
Anonymous ★ Top Pick Turns out the government's memory safety policy had a dangling pointer and was promptly deallocated
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    Turns out the government's memory safety policy had a dangling pointer and was promptly deallocated

  2. Anonymous

    The White House free()’d the memory-safety PDF, instantly dereferencing every link; Rustaceans just wrapped it in an Arc<Wayback> and kept the program - er, policy - alive

  3. Anonymous

    The White House discovered that even government websites aren't immune to memory leaks - they just lost an entire document about memory safety. At least someone had the foresight to malloc() a copy on the Internet Archive before the garbage collector kicked in

  4. Anonymous

    Nothing says 'memory safe' quite like a government report that gets deallocated without proper cleanup. At least someone had the foresight to archive it before the URL became a dangling pointer - though I suspect the White House's version control strategy is still 'email attachments with timestamps in the filename.'

  5. Anonymous

    White House memory-safety report: allocated fanfare, then use-after-free on the hosting - dangling link detected

  6. Anonymous

    Nothing says “embrace memory safety” like free()’ing the press release and leaving the internet with a dangling pointer to policy - good thing the Wayback Machine runs a global GC

  7. Anonymous

    White House pulled the “memory‑safe software” page - textbook use‑after‑free: policy deallocated, link left dangling; good thing the Wayback Machine is the nation’s append‑only log

  8. @GLXBX 1y

    Lmao, fuck rust

    1. @mira_the_cat 1y

      yeah, ML-family/haskell and lisps are better

  9. @LennyLizowzskiy 1y

    it's still there https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/press-release-technical-report/

    1. @mira_the_cat 1y

      why didn't they mention their own language? imo ada is better than rust

      1. @colllapse 1y

        it is nice in type restrictions but clunky at syntax level

        1. @mira_the_cat 1y

          i like its syntax more than rust's

          1. @sylfn 1y

            verbosity is good when controlled, not to the Pascal or Zig extreme

            1. @mira_the_cat 1y

              i like pascal's syntax

              1. @sylfn 1y

                survivorship bias

                1. @mira_the_cat 1y

                  wdym?

            2. @hafijuldev 1y

              zig is verbose?

              1. @sylfn 1y

                in non-syntax way

                1. @hafijuldev 1y

                  okay, from implementation perspective?

  10. @azizhakberdiev 1y

    bleeding edge software all the way

  11. @yontouryuu 1y

    Use Holy C, my child

    1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 1y

      TempleOS

      1. @yontouryuu 1y

        You have to be pure to use that

  12. @graduated_vernier 1y

    Sweet, back to C and dubious strcpys!

  13. @eescarez 1y

    The report was archived because every administration restarts the WH's site, but it is still applicable until further notice.

  14. @SamsonovAnton 1y

    Did Trump mean that Rust is gay? 🤔

    1. @sabdawn 1y

      More like nay

  15. @FunnyGuyU 1y

    You can totally write memory safe software in C. Right?

    1. @qtsmolcat 1y

      Can, didn't mean it's easy to

    2. @mira_the_cat 1y

      with workarounds like MISRA and formal verification, and almost no one does this. languages like rust do this for you with some easy checked rules that are hoped to be sound, languages like ats and f* make formal verification of low-level code built-in

    3. @mohamed_023 1y

      Yes

    4. @colllapse 1y

      you can but you won't

  16. @ashit_axar 1y

    We don't increase cpu instructions anymore. Even we go opposite (RISC). Software will fill the gap. I think the C is the software RISC Ai+C will go through them all Simplicity is key for both human and mashine

  17. @GioMetal 1y

    it is called skill. if you have it you totally can

  18. _ 1y

    While it's theoretically possible to write memory safe programs in C, years of security vulnerabilities have proven that nobody has enough skill to do so for complex programs

    1. @azizhakberdiev 1y

      C is just a little bit better assembly. There's no need for it to care about memory safety

      1. @RiedleroD 1y

        eh, well… mabe not that low-level

      2. @purplesyringa 1y

        C is neither portable nor assembly 😭 stop with this propaganda

        1. @azizhakberdiev 1y

          so we pretend that embellishment of memory issues is not propaganda?

          1. @purplesyringa 1y

            the CVE list speaks for itself

            1. @sylfn 1y

              https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/CVE-2024-12084/

            2. @azizhakberdiev 1y

              It is right to mention these threats. But the proposal suggests to find a way to totally eliminate them in the future which is same as cutting off your arm

              1. @purplesyringa 1y

                or, hear me out, using an approach that eliminates 99% of these threats without cutting off your arm

                1. @sylfn 1y

                  just use gayer language

                2. @purplesyringa 1y

                  you don't need to bury your head in the sand and ignore existing solutions

                3. @azizhakberdiev 1y

                  To brand the entirety of IT industry as a cult that secretly hides that 1% as a forbidden knowledge?

                  1. @purplesyringa 1y

                    ...literally what are you talking about

                    1. @purplesyringa 1y

                      do I not know English? do you not know English?

                  2. @colllapse 1y

                    it's not forbidden, just lost. reinventing the wheel is not an illusion and it's oftentimes related to lost tech known decades ago

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