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Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

>I used to think writing safe code in C/C++ was a matter of skill.

It's a matter of how many fucks the devs gave about doing quality work. You can find inexperienced people deliver quality work simply because they're passionate and they care (Half-Life was made in part by people with no prior game or coding experience), and you can find supposed rockstars deliver slop because for whatever reason they don't care, they just want to punch in, collect paychecks, then punch out.

FAANG stopped being a benchmark of skill a while ago. It's a skill of griding leetcode and 7 stage interviews to get it, then resting and vesting till you can jump ship to something better or get mass layd off.

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> It's a matter of how many fucks the devs gave about doing quality work.

It's more a matter of how much management cares about quality, and how much time and how many resources they're willing to devote to it.

And that's a function of how much the quality of the code actually matters in the market.

FANG doesn't have resources, but indie coders and game studios do?

You can have all the resources in the world but it won't matter if you spend them on something else.

Notice I said how much management is willing to devote, not how much they have.

I think you’re a bit optimistic about the quality of a triple-A game’s codebase that was rushed to a holiday release date. I have slightly more tolerance for bugginess in a game.

Has there ever existed a C or C++ codebase of significant size that hasn't had exploitable memory corruption issues? I don't think we can keep saying it's a question of the dev's passion or skill or whatever, if no dev has ever managed to do it.

That's not to say memory corruption issues are the only kind of issues, and rewriting a mature C/C++ codebase into a memory safe language may well introduce more issues than it fixes...

Outside of specially designed and verified code, probably not. Although there are certainly many projects where there are so few memory-safety issues that is is irrelevant in practice compared to other issues. Most of the issues I see are very easily preventable by using a string and a buffer abstractions that do bounds checking.

Also I think it is noteworthy that memory-safety issues are really well-defined and can automatically be found using sanitizers and fuzzers or verification tools. This is not the case for many other correctness issues and once memory safety issues are fixed this will remain as a major problem for all code.

An example that comes to mind is postfix (the SMTP daemon). It hasn't had zero memory safety issues, but nearly so. Certainly an abnormally low amount given the size/complexity of the project and the number of eyes on it.

It's also had a pretty 'normal' (read: higher) amount of non-memory related bugs such as SMTP smuggling of filesystem permission TOCTOU, so it's not like its devs are somehow really good at just not writing bugs.

Maybe they have chosen a software architecture that allows them to avoid complicated memory-related logic? I genuinely don't know, would love to hear from a postfix developer.

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