Viewing profile — btrask

I might be the last person to realize this, but did Microsoft name it .NET because they already had COM?

This article does not undermine its own point. In fact, very, very few articles ever undermine their own point. In order to undermine your own point it means you've failed to const…

I didn't like Regehr's proposal because I don't want a friendly dialect of C. I mostly just want C the way it worked up until, say, GCC 4.x. I don't know specifically how to fix th…

Or... the standard just has bugs which could be fixed. Bugs meaning: being out of line with the history of C and large amounts of C code in the wild. The more people beat the stand…

Yeah, in C you need to use assertions (or simple checks) for things that might be null. That said the compiler isn't infinitely smart (thank god) and complex null derefs will "safe…

If you are transferring ownership, you would do p2 = p1; p1 = NULL; However if you are intentionally doing multiple ownership, then yes you can still have problems.

Green threads.

I see now, I misunderstood your original post. You were saying async/await is necessary because futures work badly, not because all the alternatives (i.e. locks) work badly. Sorry,…

Whether it's kernel threads or green threads, the same patterns (locks, etc) are possible. Locks are supposed to be the borrow checker's bread and butter, because it can guarantee …

Wait, what? What happened to "fearless concurrency"? I thought this was supposed to be one of the borrow checker's selling points! https://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Co…

So over the last thousand years salt has been a hyper-inflationary asset, and you're trying to tell me I'm rich for owning some?

This article is such a great opportunity for introspection ("what do we need in order to do better?"). It's too bad that the top comment has turned it into an opportunity for egoti…

Very reasonable! Thank you for the discussion :)

Taking a pointer-to-pointer is intentional to make it clear that the pointer will be modified. That's actually the most important difference from nn3's version IMHO.

Good points, thank you for explaining! I can see an argument for wrapping it in a macro so you can turn off nulling in debug builds (ASan might even have hooks so you can automate …

I tried making it a plain function at one point but ran into some weirdness around using void * * with certain arguments (const buffers?). You don't want to accept plain void * bec…

do {} while(0) is a common idiom for macros in C, because it consumes the trailing semicolon, which a bare {} block doesn't do. if(x) MACRO(); else something(); expands to if(x) { …

I appreciate you defending me, but I don't think he was trying to be dishonest.

I don't think that's fair in this case because nulling out pointers isn't the first line of defense. If you forget to do it once, it's not going to cause a bug in and of itself. Yo…

Help me out here, because I'm really trying to understand. Are you saying that dangling pointers that blow up if you double-free them is an "automatic check"? If not, what kind of …

In C you can use [0] for postfix pointer dereferencing.

Here's the actual macro I (sometimes) use: #define FREE(ptrptr) do { \ __typeof__(ptrptr) const __x = (ptrptr); \ free(*__x); *__x = NULL; \ } while(0) There might be a better way …

Every problem can be solved in many different ways. If you think you've already got use-after-free bugs under control, then more power to you! You absolutely have to concentrate yo…

All code is full of vulnerabilites. If you say your code isn't, then I'm sure it is. I just do the best I can to keep the error rate as low as possible. But it's a rate, and it's n…