LibreSSL – the first 30 days
openbsd.org
openbsd.org
1: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-g...
There was a time about 15 years ago, when many UNIX variants had sub-optimal malloc, or other core libraries, and custom implementations were common in large Open Source projects (as well as commercial products). Those operating systems are mostly gone (Solaris remains, kinda, and there's still some big iron running those old beasts), but I haven't seen a newish project using a custom malloc or other core library in years. I couldn't name the projects that made that choice back then, but I remember seeing it very frequently, when I used to read a lot more C source than I do, today.
According to https://www.webkit.org/quality/leakhunting.html, it may even have multiple ones: "Get a fresh WebKit build, ideally a Debug build as this turns off the various custom allocators in WebKit."
It wouldn't surprise me to find custom allocations in many other large projects that may be memory constrained (postgres, open office, gcc, clang, you name it) at some size, the extra burden of a custom allocator isn't that large relative to the size of a project.
I personally will stay on the path of using the Go built-in SSL library. Sure there are theoretical issues, but no real ones, I trust that real ones will be handled promptly as they appear and everything is well reviewed and unit tested (and of course is written in a memory safe language). I realize this isn’t an option for the non-gophers, but for gophers... yeah. Maybe when Go (hopefully soon) can be compiled to shared libraries this will be an option for non-Go projects.
These guys are doing heroic work, kudos to them. This is not garbage I would want to have to take out.
If you want to create a library like OpenSSL that every consumer in every language can use, C is your only practical choice.
If today I was creating OpenSSL from scratch there are other options. If I need it NOW I could use D. If I was willing to wait a few months or contribute Go shared library support I could use Go. If I was willing to wait until Rust was mature to release and deal with its churn in development I could use Rust.
I guess I'm just suffering from sour grapes over the fact HN continues to suffer more and more of down-voting for sake of disagreement rather than for factual inaccuracy.
Go and D are also not yet available for every platform and would force a set of design constraints on consumers that would likely decrease its attractiveness as a solution.
Again, C remains the best choice given the goals I mentioned. It's also why I said OS systems programming and not just systems programming.
As for Go's large dependencies are you talking about the Go runtime as build time dependency, because Go is notable for its pronounced lack of runtime dependencies?
In any case, I think you and I both have an understanding of the issues at hand, I just think we would be willing to make different trade-offs.
The reality is that those "minor" platforms you refer to are ones where a lot of big iron and expensive systems are. While Go / LLVM will eventually be supported on them, Go is still a very large dependency, and is currently not suitable for OS systems programming.
If you did choose to write a new security library in Go, and supposing that the shared library issue was addressed, you'd still have to severely constrain the design of the library to ensure maximum interoperability.
I'm just not sure it's worth the compromise.
Rust, if it was ready, and its runtime dependencies were also better supported, would be far more appropriate than Go.
What big iron targets would you say are also required? Here are some possibilities I can think of: SPARC, IBM's z/Architecture (what about ESA/390 or earlier?) and POWER (the latter of which historically includes more than one ISA), Intel's IA-64 (Itanium, used by HP).
Modulo the various Power ISAs, which I am not familiar with, LLVM claims "is generally reliable" support for all of the about except IA-64: http://llvm.org/docs/CodeGenerator.html#target-feature-matri...
Which doesn't mean production level quality, of course.
More critically, just because LLVM has back end support of an architecture, doesn't mean any particular language using LLVM will support it, or at least as I recall, the language has to know and use details about the back ends it's targeting.
Regardless, one of LLVM's biggest problems internally is the number of unaligned accesses, which hurts its performance on many architectures (except x86 of course, where the penalty is very minor). That's not specific to SPARC, but it does hurt performance there quite a bit as well as cause other problems.
That would be pretty awful; on how many architectures do they still cause exceptions?
ARM says the ARMv6 was the first architecture to support this (http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....).
They're worked around by forcing alignment at the cost of performance if I remember correctly, or in some cases, they're not and cause LLVM to fail.
The alignment problems may be unique to the SPARC backend of LLVM, but I don't recall the specifics.
Also, while I think it will likely prove a great alternative (especially for OS level systems programming), it's clearly early days and the language is still undergoing significant churn.
Why not send it to a PDF printer and cutdown that filesize (and not make it take an age to open in a browser)?
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.htm...
"This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters"
The whole page is ~484kb, which in this day is not much at all (many pages serve more css than that). I do like to complain about big pages as well, but I can't say this is one of those.
But I agree, a pdf would be sweet. My biggest complain with the site is that it doesn't work great on a mobile device (very small links, can't press on a slide to go to the next, and Firefox mobile open the page in "full size" mode with only half a slide visible without zooming back).