41–50 of 504 posts
Honestly, why not do it once and for all in a strongly typed pure functional language, validate it, and then tweak the GC parameters to get the performance? Use the safest and most powerful language that you can, if you can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you pass this buffer to e.g. read() and it will still guarantee no buffer overflow even if the programmer mis-calculate the size argument to read() ?
No. It then follows that reading things safely is therefore a completely insurmountable problem in C. There is no possible way for me thin wrapper around read that works on bounds checked arrays, and not use "read" cavalierly in my code without thinking. Right?
Can anybody make a strong case to me as to why are buffer overflows considered an issue in C when it takes like 10 minutes to write and test an array implementation that prevents that from ever happening? I do agree that C has issues (though in my opinion neighter Rust nor Go address almost any of them) i just don't understand why are buffer overflows such a huge problem in C when the same thing is going to come up w…
Or perhaps just some helper functions in C that wrap array and pointer allocation/access to provide sanity checks. Seems like moving to a new language is rather extreme....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this abstraction zero-cost? What's the overhead? Can you give me a similar set of primitives to manipulate memory in a temporally safe manner as well? What is the cost of that abstraction? How does it compare to a runtime's GC?
> Is this abstraction zero-cost? What's the overhead? It will cost a single correctly predicted branch, which is effectively free on modern architectures. Any "safe" language will have to make this conditional branch too (Rust's File::read method will check the size of the slice).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that it doesn't occur to people to build safe abstractions in C to deal with things like buffer overflows still shocks me. C is fairly low level by todays standards. You 100% have to build abstractions using the standard library and then use those abstractions, rather than just using standard library functions everywhere. This isn't an argument against safer languages, or higher level languages, or languages…
Is this abstraction zero-cost? What's the overhead? Can you give me a similar set of primitives to manipulate memory in a temporally safe manner as well? What is the cost of that abstraction? How does it compare to a runtime's GC?
As for the cost of the abstraction of bound checked arrays of arbitrary length, I can't imagine it being any slower than rust. I could be wrong. If you'd care to provide an example program in whatever language you are advocating, I can give you an implementation in C using a bounds checked array ADT, and we can compare notes.
Can anybody make a strong case to me as to why are buffer overflows considered an issue in C when it takes like 10 minutes to write and test an array implementation that prevents that from ever happening? I do agree that C has issues (though in my opinion neighter Rust nor Go address almost any of them) i just don't understand why are buffer overflows such a huge problem in C when the same thing is going to come up w…
Because your 'safe' implementation will certainly have a performance cost, and won't be the default. This is why, despite C++ providing std::array, you'll still find buffer overflows in C++ code. C++'s std::array provides the safe 'at' function but you're opting into a performance penalty and it's not the more familiar [] syntax. Rust arrays/ vectors are safe-by-default. To use the unchecked, unsafe version requires…
Can anybody make a strong case to me as to why are buffer overflows considered an issue in C when it takes like 10 minutes to write and test an array implementation that prevents that from ever happening? I do agree that C has issues (though in my opinion neighter Rust nor Go address almost any of them) i just don't understand why are buffer overflows such a huge problem in C when the same thing is going to come up w…
Or perhaps just some helper functions in C that wrap array and pointer allocation/access to provide sanity checks. Seems like moving to a new language is rather extreme....
Moving to an abstraction would potentially solve some overflow issues and requires constant attention. Moving to a safe language likely solves all of them and you get checked by the compiler instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll bet he can give you an array_read() function that does what you ask. I know I could.
The fact that it doesn't occur to people to build safe abstractions in C to deal with things like buffer overflows still shocks me. C is fairly low level by todays standards. You 100% have to build abstractions using the standard library and then use those abstractions, rather than just using standard library functions everywhere. This isn't an argument against safer languages, or higher level languages, or languages…
> I could push chars onto it and I didn't have to worry
And how did you implement this? Are you stitching together chunks of memory, or are you reallocating and copying? If you are reallocating and copying, what do you do when you have a point to the old address space that still exists? Now instead of manually updating memory and knowing you have to take care of pointers, your dynamic implementation might change stuff from underneath you without you noticing.
Can anybody make a strong case to me as to why are buffer overflows considered an issue in C when it takes like 10 minutes to write and test an array implementation that prevents that from ever happening? I do agree that C has issues (though in my opinion neighter Rust nor Go address almost any of them) i just don't understand why are buffer overflows such a huge problem in C when the same thing is going to come up w…
Or perhaps just some helper functions in C that wrap array and pointer allocation/access to provide sanity checks. Seems like moving to a new language is rather extreme....
Rust and Go are not your only choices here. C++ with aggressive use of modern features and aggressive non-use of everything inherited from C is also a fine choice, but enforcing that discipline is hard, and the compiler won't help you a lot. Honestly, a dynamic language like Python or Ruby is also a fine choice in many cases, although NTP might be too latency-sensitive for that to work. (But it might not be! Premature optimization and all that.)