Those evil companies block random users, just because their government made some laws about it.

I’d go for open source projects. They usually have bigger code bases and good practices, that they enforce on their contributors with code reviews and such.

It’s a good way to get feedback on your code, something miss out on personal projects and get much less of in university and corporate projects.

Github login does not help much… devs are on github, not on random forgjo instances. That’s where they see your project. Github is also where they put their fork of your project when they play with it. They will write comments using github markdown and won’t care whether that renders correctly or not in your forge.

And it is where they will report issues and open a PR. It is annoying, but it is how it is. When you ask them to open the PR elsewhere they complain sinde they need to set up an account there and copy ssh key and similar things. You need a very dedicated contributor to go through with all that… especially if it is just a few lines of drive-by fixes.

I never said that you can not run a project elsewhere, my point is that you will get way more interaction on github.

Try pushing your project to github and compare the interactions you get from both forges.

That unfortunately requires setting up email… I have not bothered doing so on my boxes in a very long time.

The biggest factor to me is developer attention. I had a project on gitlab and pushed a README.md with a link to the gitlab instance into github. I got about 10 times more reactions from github, incl. PRs (where the person had grabbed the code from gitlab and did a PR on github anyway) – even in this setup. Mirroring a project to github tilts that even further.

Not being present on github means a lot less users and contributors. As long as that stays this way there is no way around github.

I hope federated forges can move some attention away from github, making other forges more visible… but I am not too optimistic :-(

The blocking certain countries is a US legal thing. It effects any forge in the US and probably in more areas close to the US. As soon as a forge gets big enough to show up on the radar of government orge they will need to do similar blocking.

You can not really blame github for that part.

Rustfmt is not very configurable. That is a wonderful thing: People don’t waste time on discussing different formatting options and every bit of rust code looks pretty identical.

Why would they need to share ssh keys? Ssh will happily accept dozens of allowed keys.

It gets rid of one more SUID binary. That’s always a win for security.

Sudo probably is way more comfortable to use and has way more configurable, too – that usually does not help to make a tool secure either:-)

When I last checked (and that is a long time ago!) it ran everywhere, but did only sandbox the application on ubuntu – while the website claimed cross distribution and secure.

That burned all the trust I had into snaps, I have not looked at them again. Flatpaks work great for me, there is no need to switch to a wannabe walled garden which may or may not work as advertised.

“I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees,”

My impression is that they are very aware of the state of C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees. That’s why they keep raising the pressure.

That depends a lot on how you define “correct C”.

It is harder to write rust code than C code that the compiler will accept. It is IMHO easier to write rust code than to write correct C code, in the sense it only uses well defined constructs defined in the C standard.

The difference is that the rust compiler is much stricter, so you need to know a lot about details in the memory model, etc. to get your code past the compiler. In C you need the same knowledge to debug the program later.

That depends on how you decide which bucket something gets thrown into.

The C++ community values things like the RAII and other features that developers can use to prevent classes of bugs. When that is you yard-stick, then C and C++ are not in one bucket.

These papers are about memory safety guarantees and not much else. C and C++ are firmly in the same bucket according to this metric. So they get grouped together in these papers.

It’s just a git repo, so it does not replace a forge. A forge provides a lot of services around the repo and makes the project discoverable for potential users. None of that is covered by this thing.

I frankly see little value wrapping a decentralized version control system into layers of cryptography that hides where the data is actually stored (and how long it is going to be stored). Just mirror the repo a couple of times and you have pretty good protection against the code going offline again and you are done. No cryptography needed, and you get a lot of extras, too.

If you do not like github: Use other forges. Self-host something, go to Codeberg or sourcehut, use something other than git like pijul or fossil, or whatever tickles your fancy. Unfortunately you will miss out on a lot of potential contributors and users there :-(

There is no regulation at this time. There may not be regulation ever. Before there is any regulation we will see nudging into the “right” direction. Suggesting that companies define a memory safety roadmap could be considered as the very first nudge, or maybe not:-)

All I wanted to say is that ignoring the possibility of regulation in such a text seems a bit short-sighted to me.

Governments triggered this entire discussion with their papers and plans to strengthen cyber defenses. The article states that some experts ask for our industry to be more regulated in this regard.

I am surprised that possible regulations are not even listed as a factor that in the decission to stay with C++ or move to something else.

Sure, COBOL is still around after decades, but nobody ever tried to pressure banks into replaceing that technology AFAICT.

GPL effects “derived works”. So if your code is derived from proprietary code, you can not use GPL, as you would need to re-license the proprietary code and you can’t do that (assuming you do not hold the copyright for the proprietary code). LGPL and permissive licenses are probably fine though.

Now what exactly is a “derived work”? That is unfortunate up to interpretation and different organizations draw the line in slightly different places. We’d need people to go to court to get that line nailed down more firmly.

Why don’t you download the latest release/nightly from github and unpack it somewhere?

Then how do you not see the point of a distributed sourceforge?

But this is no forge, it is just a git repo.

Again, have you even opened the webpage?

Yeap, I even put a repo into it. That’s why I am so certain that it is useless.

Hosting a git repo is not a problem. Having an discoverable forge is. And this does not help with that in any way.

So github is not a problem?

Something can not be a solution independent of whether or not something else is another problem or not.

And regarding crypto, show me where in the code it forces you to use crypto. Show me the rad command that inhibits you from doing a normal git operation by bringing up crypto.

There is lots of needless crypto(graphy) going on all over the place. It is entirely useless for code hosting in a git repo.