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During my PhD I wrote a lot of simulation code in Matlab. This code was only ever run by me on my personal machine for the purpose of generating plots for my th

During my PhD I wrote a lot of simulation code in Matlab. This code was only ever run by me on my personal machine for the purpose of generating plots for my thesis. How is that security-sensitive? We all agree that security is important and a lot of code running in security-sensitive contexts is bad. That's very different from saying that all code is security-sensitive.

kaba0 3y ago
Matlab is memory-safe, though, which is the kind of safety issue we talk about.
- defrost 3y ago
  > Matlab is memory-safe, though Who sold you that notion? Matlab is proprietary glue holding together modules written in Fortran, C, C++, Java that allows the adhoc inclusion of DLLS put together by graduate students on the fly. In what universe is any of that "memory safe"?
  - kaba0 3y ago
    AFAIK it used to be written/interpreted in Java (though it uses a JIT compiler nowadays, doesn’t it?), and in that sense the language itself is memory safe. Of course if you link to a dependency written in an unsafe language you can have memory issues, but that is not what people commonly mean by “a memory safe language”.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > Of course if you link to a dependency written in an unsafe language Like the matrix handling, plotting, and other modules dragged in from the 1990s standard FORTRAN library era. Don't get me wrong, I have placed a lot of trust in those kinds of numeric libraries since the 1980s - NIST and other national labs code and review to a high standard - but they weren't then and aren't now "memory safe" just very probably and mostly bug free. Unless they were, say, rewritten in Java .. and that's a whole other big ball of issues .. translated code. I'm happy to play along and agree that the JIT compiled 'Matlab language' parts of Matlab are memory safe - but to the best of my experience with past versions that's just the glue portions - the reason so many people use Matlab is for the chunks that get glued together.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Aren’t many of these Fortran libraries heavily used all throughout almost any kind of application, somewhere deep down their dependency tree?
        defrost 3y ago
        Absolutely .. and generally written to a very high standard with a lot of checking, rechecking and running forwards and backwards across multiple architectures with extensive technical mailing lists. They can still have bugs, memory issues, be called with parameters that cause resource blow outs and aren't "memory safe" in the sense that modern managed languages are. Matlab is exactly as reliable as well written Fortran and C code can be.

kaba0 3y ago

Matlab is memory-safe, though, which is the kind of safety issue we talk about.

defrost 3y ago
> Matlab is memory-safe, though Who sold you that notion? Matlab is proprietary glue holding together modules written in Fortran, C, C++, Java that allows the adhoc inclusion of DLLS put together by graduate students on the fly. In what universe is any of that "memory safe"?
- kaba0 3y ago
  AFAIK it used to be written/interpreted in Java (though it uses a JIT compiler nowadays, doesn’t it?), and in that sense the language itself is memory safe. Of course if you link to a dependency written in an unsafe language you can have memory issues, but that is not what people commonly mean by “a memory safe language”.
  - defrost 3y ago
    > Of course if you link to a dependency written in an unsafe language Like the matrix handling, plotting, and other modules dragged in from the 1990s standard FORTRAN library era. Don't get me wrong, I have placed a lot of trust in those kinds of numeric libraries since the 1980s - NIST and other national labs code and review to a high standard - but they weren't then and aren't now "memory safe" just very probably and mostly bug free. Unless they were, say, rewritten in Java .. and that's a whole other big ball of issues .. translated code. I'm happy to play along and agree that the JIT compiled 'Matlab language' parts of Matlab are memory safe - but to the best of my experience with past versions that's just the glue portions - the reason so many people use Matlab is for the chunks that get glued together.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Aren’t many of these Fortran libraries heavily used all throughout almost any kind of application, somewhere deep down their dependency tree?
      - defrost 3y ago
        Absolutely .. and generally written to a very high standard with a lot of checking, rechecking and running forwards and backwards across multiple architectures with extensive technical mailing lists. They can still have bugs, memory issues, be called with parameters that cause resource blow outs and aren't "memory safe" in the sense that modern managed languages are. Matlab is exactly as reliable as well written Fortran and C code can be.