I used to think writing safe code in C/C++ was a matter of skill. However, after finding more than a few issues with AFL at a FAANG in code written by engineers with the highest engineering title, I changed my mind. Incredible tool.
It is a matter of skill to a large extent, though. A skilled programmer will write fewer bugs on average than an unskilled one. They'll know the patterns to avoid and have a higher bar for quality. Nobody can write 100% bug-free code, independent of programming language. Also, job title might correlate with skill but it doesn't rule out incompetence at the highest levels.
Sometimes writing shitty code is a result of competence, not incompetence. I've seen much better programmers than I ever will be writing terrible code because it was the fastest way to get a prototype running and find out whether the problem was worth writing good code for.
Writing <i>safer</i> C is a matter of skill.<p>Writing <i>safe</i> C is a matter of either radically different (much, much slower) process or better tooling or both. Skill is not sufficient.
It doesn't really matter, the most skilled programmers are usually working on harder stuff, so the bug rate remains fairly consistent.
I think it's mostly a testing thing. Valgrind is a friend a lot of people haven't heard of for c/c++. Setting up good regression tests is an art. Maintaining them is even harder.
I think that good use of static analysis and fuzz testing is a part of the skill to detail-oriented programming languages.
<i>>I used to think writing safe code in C/C++ was a matter of skill.</i><p>It's a matter of how many fucks the devs gave about doing quality work. You can find inexperienced people deliver quality work simply because they're passionate and they care (Half-Life was made in part by people with no prior game or coding experience), and you can find supposed rockstars deliver slop because for whatever reason they don't care, they just want to punch in, collect paychecks, then punch out.<p>FAANG stopped being a benchmark of skill a while ago. It's a skill of griding leetcode and 7 stage interviews to get it, then resting and vesting till you can jump ship to something better or get mass layd off.
> It's a matter of how many fucks the devs gave about doing quality work.<p>It's more a matter of how much management cares about quality, and how much time and how many resources they're willing to devote to it.<p>And <i>that's</i> a function of how much the quality of the code actually matters in the market.
Has there ever existed a C or C++ codebase of significant size that hasn't had exploitable memory corruption issues? I don't think we can keep saying it's a question of the dev's passion or skill or whatever, if no dev has ever managed to do it.<p>That's not to say memory corruption issues are the only kind of issues, and rewriting a mature C/C++ codebase into a memory safe language may well introduce more issues than it fixes...
Outside of specially designed and verified code, probably not. Although there are certainly many projects where there are so few memory-safety issues that is is irrelevant in practice compared to other issues. Most of the issues I see are very easily preventable by using a string and a buffer abstractions that do bounds checking.<p>Also I think it is noteworthy that memory-safety issues are really well-defined and can automatically be found using sanitizers and fuzzers or verification tools. This is not the case for many other correctness issues and once memory safety issues are fixed this will remain as a major problem for all code.