The US government urges coders to use 'memory-safe programming languages'

This move by the US government is part of President Biden's Cyber ​​Security strategy and is a step to "secure the building blocks of cyberspace".

Memory safety refers to protection against errors and vulnerabilities related to memory access such as buffer overflows and hanging pointers.

Among today's popular programming languages, Java's runtime error checking should be considered a memory-safe programming language. Meanwhile, some programming languages ​​lack features related to memory safety such as C and C++. The report states C and C++ are "insecure programming languages".

The ONCD report does not detail which programming languages ​​are considered memory safe. However, in November 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) released a detailed cybersecurity fact sheet on programming languages ​​considered memory-safe.

The following are the programming languages ​​recommended by the NSA:

1. Rust
2. Go
3. C#
4. Java
5. Swift
6. JavaScript
7. Ruby

The languages ​​recommended by the NSA above are all in the top 20 most popular languages.

Marvin Fry

Update 01 March 2024