Thoughts on statement "abandon security-weak languages like C++"

[chris.d...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I was wondering with al the fuss around memory safe languages, what does the future hold for the "Scintilla and SciTE" project? 

Can the project continue like before, or does this imply some or maybe a lot of rework?

Will the end users be affected?

Just some stuff I'm thinking about :)

I wouldn't want to see great projects like this be dismissed just because of statements like these.

Regards

Chris

[Neil Hodgson]

Chris:

> I was wondering with al the fuss around memory safe languages, what does the future hold for the "Scintilla and SciTE" project?

Back around 2001, I thought that safe managed execution environments like Java or .Net would take over and applications would be prohibited from using low level languages like C++. So I started SinkWorld https://scintilla.sourceforge.io/SinkWorld.html as a new code base for Scintilla but eventually gave up.

The market chose non-managed languages for most applications. Frequency limitations stopped single performance growing fast enough so the overhead of the managed runtimes was mostly too high. Mobile devices had slower processes so Apple chose a non-managed language Objective-C and was very successful. Since multiple threads commonly cause more and worse bugs than manual memory management that wasn't an easy way forward.

> Can the project continue like before, or does this imply some or maybe a lot of rework?

There would have to be a way to add safety incrementally or it's unlikely to happen. For deep restructuring, it can be faster to build from zero than to carry over code.

> I wouldn't want to see great projects like this be dismissed just because of statements like these.

An equivalent project to Scintilla in a memory-safe language may be a good project for someone to start. It's not likely to be me.

Neil