Seriously, Heartbleed was entirely caused by pointers being dangerous. This is not hard - we should get rid of general purpose pointers.
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@frabcus The danger in languages like C come from their power. If you remove the danger you remove the power. Sometimes power is needed.
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@dsilverstone that's the point though, pretty well all uses of C/C++ don't need that power. e.g. Gecko didn't, c.f. Servo. What uses do?
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@frabcus Also, you're still assuming that the compiler is good and that the author understands the chip in question.
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@frabcus Yes it's a smaller surface, but all that means is that all the attacks are focussed there. There's money in attacks :-(

Jan 19, 2015 ยท 10:38 AM UTC

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Replying to @dsilverstone
@dsilverstone thanks for all those! am taking notes, and am thinking of doing a blog post with them all in
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@frabcus A full and frank discussion of these topics is an opportunity for much blogging :-)