News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit. Parent comment

Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by willis936 on Monday February 08, 2021 @08:35PM (#26072775)
I’ve made 4 decent sized gui based tools before. I would never use GUIDE. At minimum it uses eval.

If you want a terrible gui-based gui creation interface: labview awaits.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by knolan on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @09:24AM (#26077783)
I compiled eval once for fun.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA t... by willis936 on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @11:11AM (#26079164)
A friend of mine did that. They were able to run arbitrary .m files from an executable. As far as I know, this doesn't violate any terms of use. I wonder what keeps someone from just downloading the freely available MATLAB runtime and running a compiled eval wrapper and suddenly have a freely available version of MATLAB.

Also just because eval can be compiled doesn't mean it should. It will forever be a security risk and I will not write code that uses it in good conscious. Fortunately, Mathworks has provided good alternatives. My personal favorite has been variable field names. It really opens up a lot of elegant coding.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/string-eva...

[ Parent | on HN ]