9 ms·

A century ago, buildings were quite dangerous, and likely to kill you in all sorts of situations. Wood burns, and concrete and brick don't. Clearly wood is an "

A century ago, buildings were quite dangerous, and likely to kill you in all sorts of situations. Wood burns, and concrete and brick don't. Clearly wood is an "unsafe material". But just changing the material didn't result in safer buildings. Buildings made of brick and concrete still killed people. It turns out that there are a lot of factors that go into building safety. The material is one vulnerability, sure. But there's also the connection method and strength, the calculated loads, shear forces, wind, earthquakes, egress, and a billion other considerations. What resulted in better building safety was the development of building codes. Even using flammable building materials, people adapted the way they built so that the end result was much safer than before. If you told a builder you'd never buy a wooden home because wood is "unsafe", they'd laugh at you - and then sell you a bunch of "inflammable" crap you don't need.

saghm 5y ago
> A century ago, buildings were quite dangerous, and likely to kill you in all sorts of situations. Wood burns, and concrete and brick don't. Clearly wood is an "unsafe material". But just changing the material didn't result in safer buildings. Buildings made of brick and concrete still killed people. This will seem trite, but I think it's just literally easier to figure out how to build wooden buildings that are fire resistant than it is to write memory safe code in C/C++.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Well, it did take us a few thousand years to get to safe wooden buildings... I actually don't think securing C/C++ code is that hard. It's certainly a skill you need to learn, but so is writing linked lists and qsort. I think people just aren't applying themselves. But the language seems to catch the flack rather than the programmer. From the article: The bug is that there is simply no bounds checking at all; sig and key are arbitrary-length, attacker-controlled blobs, and cx->u is a fixed-size buffer. As we can see, the programmer just made no effort to secure the code. But we still blame the language, like blaming wood for being flammable. Anyway. I'm definitely not against new languages. But I think before a program is rewritten, it should be for a reason much better than "I didn't want to secure the code".

saghm 5y ago

> A century ago, buildings were quite dangerous, and likely to kill you in all sorts of situations. Wood burns, and concrete and brick don't. Clearly wood is an "unsafe material". But just changing the material didn't result in safer buildings. Buildings made of brick and concrete still killed people. This will seem trite, but I think it's just literally easier to figure out how to build wooden buildings that are fire resistant than it is to write memory safe code in C/C++.

throwaway984393 5y ago
Well, it did take us a few thousand years to get to safe wooden buildings... I actually don't think securing C/C++ code is that hard. It's certainly a skill you need to learn, but so is writing linked lists and qsort. I think people just aren't applying themselves. But the language seems to catch the flack rather than the programmer. From the article: The bug is that there is simply no bounds checking at all; sig and key are arbitrary-length, attacker-controlled blobs, and cx->u is a fixed-size buffer. As we can see, the programmer just made no effort to secure the code. But we still blame the language, like blaming wood for being flammable. Anyway. I'm definitely not against new languages. But I think before a program is rewritten, it should be for a reason much better than "I didn't want to secure the code".