uecker

Rust isn't perfect, this is my point. But its marketing is based on this idea ("rule out whole class of bugs"). If this were true then the bugs I cited could not exist, so they severe …

I think Rust helps a lot for people who would other struggle because they would otherwise create a mess by enforcing certain high-level structure that rules out certain problems. But you can just use …

Most of this can be done just fine in practice. NULL safety is not so much an issue as people claim as trapping is safe on most implementations and then similar to a panic in other languages. If you c…

C is a tool which requires expertise but then goes out of your way and let's you do things, and do things rather efficiently, with no overhead, and exactly how you want. If you want it to cut off…

This is about as correct as saying http is bloated because there are printer protocols using REST.

It is amazing. It is the result of two decades of research in image reconstruction algorithms. The machine learning is part of it, but that it is sold as "AI" has probably more to do with ma…

Reimplementing everything is not an option in C. But one should be able to pass string views directly to printf. The allocating version is what string_dup does. strv2cstr is certainly more dangerous.…

Without this flag it can also attach to existing processes and on my Debian this is set to zero.

It will not add one if there isn't one already. (I should probably rename this function, work in progress..). But the type is an array of the correct length. Edit: renamed to strv2array

BTW: I was experimenting a bit more with string and string view (strv) types in my e toy library: https://codeberg.org/uecker/noplate/ The tests are maybe better examples th…

It is not really the same as LLMs. I wouldn't call it AI. And I wouldn't say "makes up". I work in this field and this is certainly based also in part on my research.

Of course they can! How do you think a debugger works?

No, there is already a secure mode which in the past worked fine but was bit too restrictive for modern clients, and there already exist hooks for fine grained access control.

It is the same issue with all sandboxing solutions. If your program does not work without giving it excessive permissions, it does not work. If we want to move to a version with minimal privileges, X…

Most of the time applications can read each other's memory, so protecting the display does not make much sense. Basic X client isolation (not using XACE just Xsecurity) would have worked for sand…

In my experience is it also possible to avoid most holes in the trousers easily with C as well and not just by testing. For example, it is also often possible to build safe abstractions by designing …

So it seems exactly the same to me?

Oh, you can get the information at compile time as well. https://godbolt.org/z/hTYbTE8j8 (or https://godbolt.org/z/K1M68sY3Y but this will be tricky in a l…

Interestingly, I would see it just the other way round. It is easier for me to reason about the code if it not cluttered with null checks and a null sanitizer is I would see as a very light-weight too…

My worries about coding all these things into type systems is that this freezes the semantics at a time during development where one is still figuring out the ideal semantics. In any case, I wonder wh…

Is it? I program in C a lot, and null pointer dereferences are not really an issue in my experience. And any option type (which you could also have in C) does not really change the fundamental problem…

Reserved identifiers in general are not only for future use of the standard, but also for internal use of implementations and for extensions. The single-under bar rule is to give the programmer some …

In C, you would typically rely much more on tooling to find bugs (but there are different styles and opinions). Checking for null is not bad, but does not usually add anything. If you de-reference a n…

Also reserved as identifier with file scope, just not for "any use". In any case, the program used underbar + capital letter.

Two things stick out as un-idiomatic for C. First, the casts before malloc are unnecessary. This you do in C++ but not in C. Second, names with beginning underscore are reserved, and the underscore + …

By complexity I mean roughly the number of language rules / techniques / idioms a programmer has to understand and keep in their head to be able to program effectively. I would say this is f…

The check can not be removed if it becomes before the access because in this case the program has no UB . If there were UB, a compiler in C is not allowed to move (time-travel) UB before any observab…

I did not know this was disputed, as even developer surveys in the Rust community highlighted complexity as a concern. But seems it is the overall summary of features that make it complex: lifetime, b…

I guess this depends on what you might corrupt (if it is not valuable but irrelevant intermediate state it might be ok) and what the consequences of an outage are. In any case, I largely tend to agree…

Considering the amount of C programs that exist, the "we see severe bugs in C code seemingly every week" is on the same level of propaganda as we see "crime in the news every week"…