No wonder rockets blow up

procedural.github.io

2 pointsProcedural2 comments

This is a low-quality article, IMHO, and the title is click-bait-ish. Yes, if you don't check your array sizes for overflow, and your pointers for NULL, your C code can crash. But Klokwork (for one) has been able to detect that stuff for several years.

Does the article give any concrete examples of failures in rockets from this? No, just "If I create a ridiculously large array index, and use it to access an array that isn't that big, the program crashes. No wonder rockets crash!" That's... not very impressive.

Thanks for pointing out Klocwork, I haven't heard of it until you mentioned it!

Sorry for the title, I was aware of its clickbaitiness but thought any way of drawing attention to a problem is necessary.

The example is there just to show the most minimal and obvious case where automatic tools were unable to predict the mistake. Of course, in real world things are way more complicated than that and if tools fail on simple examples like this they definitely won't be able to find anything in real codebases.

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