re-writing college books [was: Re: A banner year for software bugs | Tech News on ZDNet]

[dcrocker at eschertech.com (David Crocker)]

Crispin Cowan wrote:

> >
For me, the enemy in the room is C++. It gives you the safety of C with the
performance of SmallTalk. There is no excuse at all to be writing anything in
C++ yet vastly too many applications are written in C++ anyway. Instead of
trying to coax developers to switch from C++ to something "weird" like SML, lets
encourage them to switch to Java or C#, which are closer to their experience.
<<

Unfortunately, there are at least two situations in which C++ is a more suitable
alternative to Java and C#:

- Where performance is critical. Run time of C# code (using the faster .NET 2.0
runtime) can be as much as double the run time of a C++ version of the same
algorithm. Try telling a large company that it must double the size of its
compute farms so you can switch to a "better" programming language!

- In hard real-time applications where garbage collection pauses cannot be
tolerated.

However, I suspect that most security-critical programs do not fall into either
of these categories, so C# or Java would indeed be a better choice than C++ for
those programs.

David Crocker, Escher Technologies Ltd.
Consultancy, contracting and tools for dependable software development
www.eschertech.com