[clug] ASD/ Five Eyes report on "Memory Safe" languages

[Steve Jenkin]

I presume this commercial tool.
Hopefully there’s no issues with reverse engineering.

<https://www.terraform.io/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraform_(software)>

I’ve been involved directly & indirectly with large (‘Ambitious’) Software projects, many in Government.
They universally ended up ‘challenged’ - over-budget & under-spec.

It exemplifies what Fred Brooks learnt: ‘adding more people to a late project makes it later’. OS/360 was terrible code, never rewritten.
There’s a large corpus of work about “Big (software) Projects” and their super-high failure rates.

For extra credit, look up “CHAOS report” from The Standish Group. They’ve nearly 30 years of data. [ Paper linked at end ]

Defence’s major projects underline the problem isn’t just ’Software’: none deliver on-time, on-budget and too many get canned completely.


Meanwhile, Linus implemented the full V7 spec between late 1991 and Jan 1994 (Linux 1.0) earning his Masters under Tanenbaum.

[ His thesis is dated 1997, "Linux: a Portable Operating System” with ports for Intel, Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, ARM and Mach & L4 virtual. ]
[ “2.0.28” was released Jan 97 ]

—————

	Big, Bang, Boom Revisited: Why Large Projects Fail
		2017
		fictional tale of impact of a single system outage
	<https://standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/BBB2017-Final-2.pdf>

> On 8 Dec 2023, at 09:22, David C <cottrill.david at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There's a much more senior engineer at work who's about to get huge funding to rewrite a Go tool in C# because it's "better for productivity" in a theoretically security consious organisation.
> The tool in question is Terraform. Genius.


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