Re:Deconstructing "K&R C"
by jpablo on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @11:08AM
(#3452272)
Passing random garbage to a random function is not the same as passing random input to a program.
Take for example one of the most common bugs in C (even more common than not null terminating strings I'll say) passing already freed memory, are you going to argue that a function has a bug because it'll randomly give root access to outsiders because someone took it out of context and passed a stray pointer to it.
Calling a function that expects to get a null terminated string buggy because you passed a pascal string and it crashes seems weird at least. I'll call it potentially dangerous when misused (like most of C code anyway), but not buggy, since it's behaved as designed.
C is an unsafe language and yes, you can validate a lot of things, but at the end of the day it's still a unsafe language, the solution in my opinion is to advocate the use of safer languages and only use C for when it's strictly necessary.
Take for example one of the most common bugs in C (even more common than not null terminating strings I'll say) passing already freed memory, are you going to argue that a function has a bug because it'll randomly give root access to outsiders because someone took it out of context and passed a stray pointer to it.
Calling a function that expects to get a null terminated string buggy because you passed a pascal string and it crashes seems weird at least. I'll call it potentially dangerous when misused (like most of C code anyway), but not buggy, since it's behaved as designed.
C is an unsafe language and yes, you can validate a lot of things, but at the end of the day it's still a unsafe language, the solution in my opinion is to advocate the use of safer languages and only use C for when it's strictly necessary.