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A comment on My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006). Parent comment

Re:My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006) by 1209091121 on Sunday June 26, 2016 @01:26PM (#11981656)
And yet, most of the Unix tools just work, which I cannot say of the average C++ program.

Can you name one C++ program with the same track record as postfix or qmail?

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Re:My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006) by prodigal_erik on Sunday June 26, 2016 @03:39PM (#11982301)
qmail contained a buffer overflow that allowed remote root access, prevented only by having a low limit on available memory.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160401021400/http://www.guninsk...

djb is a smart and motivated guy and even he isn't quite capable of writing correct C code; how much chance does anyone else have?

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Re:My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006) by 10019310231 on Sunday June 26, 2016 @03:51PM (#11982366)
qmail is supposed to be used with "softlimit" from daemontools. All decent tutorials mention that.

Again, which C++ program has been even analyzed to that level?

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Re:My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006) by SamReidHughes on Sunday June 26, 2016 @06:33PM (#11983112)
Did it ever occur to you that if a C++ programmer of security mindset wanted to make something like postfix or qmail, they'd just pick a language that was garbage collected?
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Re:My Most Important C++ Aha Moments (2006) by 101291091 on Monday June 27, 2016 @04:46AM (#11984899)
No, it did not occur to me. The reason is precisely that I have not seen this mindset among C++ programmers, at least in the open source world. Llvm is an exception.

What I do see is hubris. They are overconfident and pretend that one can use C++ like Haskell, i.e. one can safely go ahead and pile one abstraction onto another.

C programmers at least know the limitations of their language.

This is the just impression that I and many others get. I'm sure there are counterexamples.

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