Re:Why you should, actually, rewrite some of it in Rust
by blub on Thursday July 13, 2017 @03:31AM
(#14759413)
A similar example was posted by matthieu_m on Reddit a while back, but that's still not worse than C, even if it's an unfortunate gap in compiler diagnostics.
From my POV compilers should warn that this code is potentially dangerous. My rule is: never return a reference or pointer from a function to something whose lifetime you don't have control of.
It's undefined behavior, despite not calling free anywhere. Replace with std::string and it could be use after free. In C, UAF wouldn't happen that silently for heap memory.