Re: VMS

On 21 Jun 2025 03:43:56 GMT, Robert Riches wrote:

On 2025-06-21, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 23:07:20 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:
>

Very likely, but the idea was to protect the typical programmer from
their own common mistakes (of not carefully checking error return
codes or buffer lengths, etc.).  I.e. the typical 9-5 contract
programmer, not the Dennis Ritchie's of the world.

>
I'm paranoid enough that I check the return of malloc and try to log
the problem even though I'm probably screwed at that point. It has
pointed out errors for calloc if you've manged to come up with a
negative size.
>
I have worked with programmers that assumed nothing bad would ever
happen.
Sadly, some had years of experience.

 
Some years ago, I heard of a bug related to use of malloc.  The code had
_intended_ to dynamically allocate storage for a string and the
terminating null byte.  It was _intended_ to do this:
 
        dest = malloc(strlen(src)+1);
 
Instead, a paren was misplaced:
 
        dest = malloc(strlen(src))+1;
 
IIUC, the next line copied the src string into the newly- allocated
destination.
 
Those who had worked on that project longer said the bug had been latent
in the code for several years, most likely with alignment padding
masking the bug from being discovered.  Curiously, the bug made itself
manifest immediately upon changing from a 32-bit build environment to a
64-bit build environment.

We picked up quite a few bugs moving from AIX to Linux. AIX was very
tolerant of null pointers. Building for Windows using the MKS toolkit was
also interesting. I've fixed 20 year old bugs that were lurking there
waiting for the right alignment of the planets.