points by Gigachad 3 days ago | 0 comments
This is what the Rust advocates have been trying to say for a decade now. But C enthusiasts would always chime in that those bugs were just caused by careless devs and a real C programmer is fine.
[–] perlgeek 3 days ago
[–] saagarjha 3 days ago
We have a pretty good idea of this actually, people have been classifying bugs into memory safety issues, etc for a while even pre-AI.
[–] klooney 2 days ago
It's worth checking in on the vulns for uutils- lots of stuff! Interacting with the world outside of the compiler has lots of details. No use after frees afaik though.
[–] AdamN 3 days ago
A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.
And now you have AI that's learned from the other 99% so nothing's changing anytime soon.
[–] rybosworld 3 days ago
> A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.
The idea that there's a small subset of C programmers who can wrangle the language into obeying them perfectly is obviously, a fantasy.
[–] dbdr 3 days ago
I would hope writing C code for the Linux kernel qualifies you as a real C programmer. And yet, here we are. Being good, careful, and extensively reviewed by others helps, but is clearly not enough.
[–] raincole 3 days ago
The problem is most drivers believe they are above average drivers.
[–] kleiba2 3 days ago
And almost all of them could be correct.
[–] AdamN 2 days ago
Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average :-)
[–] imtringued 3 days ago
Yes but even if you swipe the Rust magic wand and somehow reduce the vulnerabilities by 99%, you are still left with 20 critical vulnerabilities per year.
There is something about kernels that make them easy targets and it's not just the language.
It's also possible that we'd need even more architectural changes to avoid such bugs.
The idea of a microkernel suddenly becomes more appealing...