Without bounds checks: game crashes, core dump.
With bounds checks: game crashes, meaningless error message given to the user.
What am I missing?
With bounds checks: game crashes, meaningless error message given to the user.
What am I missing?
Without bounds checks: I join a multiplayer lobby, and the next thing I know my computer is part of a botnet.
This isn't an imaginary fear, it has happened many times. Some examples from a brief search: https://gridinsoft.com/blogs/rce-vulnerability-in-gta-online... https://www.polygon.com/22898895/dark-souls-pvp-exploit-mult... https://security.gerhardt.link/RCE-in-Factorio/
I am not claiming all of these would've been prevented by bounds checking arrays, or even memory safety in general. The point is that security is not optional just because it's a game.
I'm not suggesting that shipping without bounds checks is wise or leads to a better product. However I do think with /some games/ security is basically not a concern.
I think it's more like (assuming it does actually go out of bounds at some point):
30% chance of core dump right away
20% chance of core dump at some point after errant write
40% chance it never crashes in testing
5% chance it doesn't crash the first year after shipping
5% chance it never crashes
With an explicit bounds check, all of these scenarios result in a crash at the exact location where the program first violated safety[1]. The developer gets a source-level crash and doesn't spend the first 20 minutes just trying to figure out what the crash dump even means.
[1] Hopefully with a complete stacktrace, maybe even the index and length values!
It's time we recognized that all our tooling should be designed to help us programmers who do have bugs in our program. Like, this crashing part is the normal part that all the tools should help deal with.
Sometimes without bounds checking you get an exploit instead of a crash.