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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to imagine that if a memory problem were reported to Sutter about one of his own programs, that he would not prioritize fixing that, over most other work.

However, I imagine he would probably take into consideration the context. Who and what is the program for? And does the issue only reproduce if the program is misused? Does the program handle untrusted inputs? Or are there conceivable situations in which a user of the program could be duped by a bad actor into feeding the program a malicious input?

Imagine Sutter wrote a C compiler, and someone found a way to crash it. But the only way to reproduce that crash is via code that invokes undefined behavior. why would Herb prioritize fixing that over other work?

Suppose the user insists that he's running the compiler as a CGI script, allowing unauthenticated visitors to their site to compile programs, making it a security issue.

How should Herb reasonably reply to that?

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The problem in this conversation is that you are equivocating between "fixing memory safety bugs" and "preventing memory safety bugs statically." When this blog post refers to "memory safety skeptics," it refers to people who think the second is not a good way to expend engineering resources, not your imagined flagrantly irresponsible engineer who is satisfied to deliver a known nonfunctional product.

It's worth differentiating the case of a specific program from the more general case of memory safety as a language feature. A specific program might take additional measures appropriate to the problem domain like static analysis or using a restricted subset of the language. Memory safety at the language level has to work for most or all code written using that language.

Herb is usually talking about the latter because of the nature of his role, like he does here [0]. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on his opinions about specific programs, because I disagree with his language opinions.

[0] https://herbsutter.com/2024/03/11/safety-in-context/

Yeah, what kind of Crazy Person would make a web site where unauthenticated visitors can write programs and it just compiles them?

What would you even call such a thing? "Compiler Explorer"?

I guess maybe if Herb had helped the guy who owned that web site, say, Matt Godbolt, to enable his "Syntax 2 for C++" compiler cppfront, on that site, it would feel like Herb ought to take some responsibility right ?

Or maybe I am being unreasonable ?

> Imagine Sutter wrote a C compiler, and someone found a way to crash it. But the only way to reproduce that crash is via code that invokes undefined behavior. why would Herb prioritize fixing that over other work?

Because submitting code that invokes undefined behavior to one's compiler is a very normal thing that most working C developers do dozens of times per day, and something that a decent C compiler should behave reasonably in response to. (One could argue that crashing is acceptable, but erasing the developer's hard drive is not - but by definition that means means undefined behaviour in this situation is not acceptable).

> Suppose the user insists that he's running the compiler as a CGI script, allowing unauthenticated visitors to their site to compile programs, making it a security issue. How should Herb reasonably reply to that?

By fixing the bug?

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