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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Including plenty of new CVEs, we have to keep the security industry job market safe.

Sure, I'm certainly not arguing that C is a good language. In RHEL we turn all warnings on, compile everything with hardening flags, use valgrind during development, and feed everything through Coverity.

> In RHEL we turn all warnings on, compile everything with hardening flags, use valgrind during development, and feed everything through Coverity.

Surely the compile time is not 100ms anymore then?

The exception that confirms the rule.

The exception? It's standard practice for distros to compile with hardening flags, and if RH submits the bugs they find with Coverity upstream, that protects the 1000s of C projects they package.

Standard practice they say,

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/this-shouldnt...

Mozilla is not a Linux distro.

You have made dozens of negative (and sometimes rude) comments in this thread. I'm curious why you're spending so much time and energy being negative. If C isn't something you're interested in, why not just ignore it and move on?

> Mozilla is not a Linux distro.

That's true. But should I interpret this to mean, "All that stuff about how careful we are doesn't actually apply to any third party software, we only do that for code we wrote" ? Because the thing about a Linux distro is that it's overwhelmingly third party software.

If that stuff does apply to NSS, then all that hard work apparently missed this pretty serious bug that could not have happened in a safe language.

C powers lots of junk where I as a user don't have a choice other than put up with security mitigations.

Being rude, yeah that is how people defend themselves when reality doesn't check.

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