> I didn't want to invoke any contest, but to remind C is used a lot in those contexts and zero termination seems to be one of the bug magnets. A very common so

> I didn't want to invoke any contest, but to remind C is used a lot in those contexts and zero termination seems to be one of the bug magnets. A very common source for security vulnerabilities as well, pretty large portion of them are related to string processing. I understand. I think the gross majority of this comes from the C standard library though, and not from the C language. qmail for example had no buffer overflow problems -- the first security vulnerabilities found 10 years after release wouldn't affect any system that qmail was developed to run on simply because nobody gave their mail server 4GB of ram! Surely the author should have predicted this problem, but it demonstrates methodology can protect against this issue. KDB takes an interesting approach of reference counting in all operators. Operators can then be optimised for situations where one argument (or both) have a reference-count of exactly one. This means writing C code with KDB's memory management library can make things very simple. Antirez also has an interesting string library that uses a combination of length+null-termination specifically for the purpose of finding bugs. > There's just no way around it. I do want to delegate things to other people. Defensive coding tends to catch and prevent a lot of mistakes at that point. Many of them have pretty cowboy attitudes towards details such as parameter validation or error checking. Some of them will need to maintain it in the distant future. I understand what you're saying, but I think technique can help a lot more than we think: Most of the software engineering industry wants to move to smarter and better tooling, and I'm just proposing we upgrade our brains some too. I don't have all the answers yet. > You're not going to put 300GB string in any standard string abstraction. In KDB this is actually pretty common, but it doesn't have a "standard string abstraction" because while it meaningfully supports byte-arrays that are in the 300GB range, the string-atoms (symbols) which are used similar to strings in python et al, never approach 1MB let alone 300GB. However in C I just did mmap() and updated the file. It took about 15 minutes to write and debug, and a few minutes to run on the server. > I don't think anyone wanted to enforce immutability. Just to have it default. I don't know. I parsed I don't know any good reason to deviate from these rules. as "enforce". I might be wrong, you'd have to ask "cousin_it" what he/she meant at the time. I know at least later they either were convinced, or clarified[1] this position. However what I meant was that I don't want to enforce those rules because I can think of an exception for each, and they understood that. Sorry I was unclear though. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842858