Heartbleed

[hudebnik]

Thanks to jducoeur, this link to XKCD's explanation of the Heartbleed bug.

OMG: I didn't realize it was this simple and stupid. Reason #738 why no production code should be written in C or C++.

Comments

Re: Fair cop

[jducoeur]

But, I say absent certain knowledge, I bet that they don't get so cozy with the hardware

Don't actually know the answer in this particular case, but the general answer for Scala is: if Java can do it, Scala can do it. (And if not, not.) For better and worse, Scala tied its fate to the JVM. (Which gives it easier access to many more toys than Haskell, at the cost of some elegance.)

And while, yes, there are definitely some major areas where C is still the right answer, they're receding pretty steadily. Performance is rarely a convincing argument any more -- the compilers for the high-level languages can generally do better than most people rolling hand-coded C -- although I agree that hardware access often still is.

In this particular case, the argument is a little subtler. I doubt that performance or hardware access are actually worth writing it in C -- but depending on a VM would rule it out for many of the places where it is being used. I'm actually not sure what the best answer is nowadays for coding a native-compiled library...