On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 18:21:09 PST, Seth Arnold said: > No, in my experience, tools like stackguard, Solar's non-executable > stack, and similar, do a great job _finding_ buggy code that would > otherwise survive in the wild unnoticed for years... The old-timers among us probably remember the last such flurry of bug-finding, the "not all the world's a VAX" flurry when Sun shipped their first boxes - and for about 3-4 years after, bugs kept cropping up in buggy software that tried to dereference a null pointer - on the Vax systems, page zero was mapped into the process space, and byte location 0 happened to have a zero in it. So code like: char *foo = NULL; .... strcpy(dest,foo); /* this happens to clone a null string "for free" */ would suddenly blow chunks on SunOS, because the first page was *not* mapped, so dereferencing that NULL would earn you a SEGV as quick as that 68020 could deliver it. Handing the programmer a SEGV the instant they do something stupid does wonders. It's a lot easier to debug that then after everything goes pear-shaped....
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