Security News > 2024 > March > Transitioning to memory-safe languages: Challenges and considerations
In this Help Net Security interview, Omkhar Arasaratnam, General Manager at the Open Source Security Foundation, discusses the evolution of memory-safe programming languages and their emergence in response to the limitations of languages like C and C++. Memory safety concerns, prevailing for over five decades, involve abstracting programmers from memory management tasks.
Modern languages like Java, Rust, Python, and JavaScript alleviate these concerns by handling memory management on behalf of the programmer, thereby allowing a focus on code quality without the risks associated with low-level memory management.
Can you discuss the evolution of memory-safe programming languages? How have they emerged as a response to the limitations of languages like C and C++ in terms of memory safety?
Languages like Java, Rust, Python, and JavaScript prevent the programmer from being "Memory unsafe" as they handle the nuance of memory management on the programmer's behalf.
Hardware support - Older languages like C and C++ are supported on a wide variety of different platforms, whereas newer languages like Rust have more limited support.
Even the best programmers make memory safety errors when using languages that aren't inherently memory-safe.