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

[David C]

Yep, but in response to license shenanigans there's an open fork. The
language itself is free of charge but Hashi are under the pump for profits
so they imposed a variety of BUSL on it. There's a few things it's good for
and a wide variety of tasks it isn't good for. Good for: heaps of cloud,
making other Hashi products "just work". What it's not good at is editing
config like Ansible.
Terraform's big thing is a state file, which is a blessing and a curse.



On Sat, 9 Dec 2023, 1:41 pm Steve Jenkin, <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
> --
>