> there are a couple of fields I can think of off the top of my head where the "experts" wheeled out to advise/scare the public are clearly more influenced by politics (or saving their own skin) than science
This feels like a thinly veiled jab at COVID era public health recommendations. Can you be more clear about which fields you’re referring to?
For years the government used cell phone data to track locations without it being known. Why wouldn't they use a more reliable way of doing it? Is there any reason to NOT suspect it?
Would you suspect a known burglar of wanting to rob your house? Well the NSA violated privacy of hundreds of millions of people. They deserve all the suspicion and no forgiveness.
It is but there are other technical and non-technical merits too. "Security" doesn't trump all. If you need secure, turn off your computer.
I tried Rust and downloaded some projects that should be comparatively simple (e.g. text editor). "cargo build" downloaded and built about 500 dependencies. The Rust ecosystem had a chance to convince me, and it sure has some convincing results. But it wasn't my cup of tea.
If you included hundreds of dependencies to do what you can't easily do yourself within the "safe" framework, that may or may not be the language's or the ecosystem's failure. But the attribute "secure" for such a project is questionable. As NPM history or a certain guy or the recent events around the xz project illustrate well.
What does knowing a lot about memory management look like? Is it like being familiar with heap allocation, the structure of fastbins and co., and some knowledge of lifetime and ownership?
In addition to that, also knowing at least basics (a bit like "classes of algorithms") of automated memory management, memory pooling, understanding and using the knowledge of allocation and mutation patterns in one's program.
A funny story related to all that from one of my previous jobs includes a high performance C++ code base that used forking to utilize preloaded code and data and to easily clean up after itself.
Turned out that naive-ish (even with jemalloc dropped in) memory management in C++ code resulted in latency spikes not because of allocation/freeing, but because they put no control over where things got allocated which resulted in huge TLB and pagetable thrashing as copy-on-write got engaged after forking.
To the point that using something like Ravenbrook's Memory Pool System (a GC) with threads quite possible would let them hit performance targets better.
>If someone has a choice, a safer more modern language can accommodate less skilled practitioners
The implication here is thoroughly debunked. We’ve seen over and over again that memory safety bugs will happen in every C codebase(ignoring toy or small codebases). Even for the mythical and infallible “skilled practitioner” spending time re-solving the solved issues inherent to C just isn’t a good use of developer time.
It’s generally the case that complex frameworks are “the simplest, most powerful and general solution,” since it is usually the case that achieving a powerful and general solution requires a great deal of irreducible complexity.
In fact I think what Ken is talking about here is using those simple tools to generate effective purpose built solutions rather than general multi-tools.
It seems that it’s been decided that Boeing, as one of the only large passenger aircraft manufacturers in the world, is too important to our national economy and security to fine out of business.
This feels like a thinly veiled jab at COVID era public health recommendations. Can you be more clear about which fields you’re referring to?