I wasn't planting a straw man, I was just pointing out that it's possible to write subtly broken C++ (or prolog, or ADA, or whatever) code as well. Maybe it wo

I wasn't planting a straw man, I was just pointing out that it's possible to write subtly broken C++ (or prolog, or ADA, or whatever) code as well. Maybe it would make it harder to introduce this kind of bug (after all, goto error handling could be considered a hack because C lacks proper exceptions) but no language is bug-proof by design. If you're writing security-sensitive code you should have complete code coverage with tests. If you have that you could implement the library in assembly for all I care. I'm not attempting to bash C++, it's a language I use from time to time. And I agree that RAII is a convenient patter that I often yearn for in C. It's just that in my opinion in this case (and in the "goto fail" bug of late) that's not the core of the issue.