Speaker
Description
For years now, the push to adopt memory-safe languages in lieu of C and C++ has been growing steadily. On the management side, it was spurred by various government-issued orders and directives. Among programmers, it was spurred by appearance of Rust as a viable contender to replace C++. The "rewrite the world" trend is going strong. However, there are open questions on how to transition an entire ecosystem, especially one such as EPICS where backwards compatibility is a high priority. It seems inevitable that introducing a memory-safe language into EPICS core is going to be a slow process.
Using a modern memory-safe language improves the quality of software because, unlike C/C++, both the language and the library ecosystem force the programmer to adopt practices and a mindset that are quite different from those of traditional C++. I would like to put forward the notion that modern C++ allows the programmer to adopt such a mindset as well, with the advantage of excellent backwards compatibility afforded by C++. To demonstrate that, I present three examples, ranging from a humble scope guard (a small utility for managing resources when interfacing with legacy C code), through a different take on managing inter-thread locking (a demonstration of a change in mindset), to a re-imagining of the user-facing API for the aSub record.
