Re:GnuTLS certificate verification vulnerability announced (...
by simias on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @05:57AM
(#7339510)
I wasn't planting a straw man, I was just pointing out that it's possible to write subtly broken C++ (or prolog, or ADA, or whatever) code as well.
Maybe it would make it harder to introduce this kind of bug (after all, goto error handling could be considered a hack because C lacks proper exceptions) but no language is bug-proof by design. If you're writing security-sensitive code you should have complete code coverage with tests. If you have that you could implement the library in assembly for all I care.
I'm not attempting to bash C++, it's a language I use from time to time. And I agree that RAII is a convenient patter that I often yearn for in C. It's just that in my opinion in this case (and in the "goto fail" bug of late) that's not the core of the issue.
Maybe it would make it harder to introduce this kind of bug (after all, goto error handling could be considered a hack because C lacks proper exceptions) but no language is bug-proof by design. If you're writing security-sensitive code you should have complete code coverage with tests. If you have that you could implement the library in assembly for all I care.
I'm not attempting to bash C++, it's a language I use from time to time. And I agree that RAII is a convenient patter that I often yearn for in C. It's just that in my opinion in this case (and in the "goto fail" bug of late) that's not the core of the issue.