They’re gearing up for war, sadly. The majority of dangerous cyber attacks are state-sponsored right now.

Seriously, a good policy to actually press this issue would be to offer financial incentives to modernize code bases since the cost to replace those old COBOL files is usually the key deterrent

It’s a nice thought, but the White House encouraging memory safety seems like a relatively insignificant push. It’s the weight of legacy code and established solutions that will hold us back for a long time.

Absolutely. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. The reason there is so much poor code - including ones with manual memory management bugs - out there is not a technical problem. There are hordes and hordes of programmers, managers, companies etc. who would love to get paid to port this stuff. They’ll do it for 10% of the price those stupid lumbering tech consultancies do it for.

But who gets the contracts in the end? Give me a f’ing break!

include $pixels;