Re: [Vala] Memory safety

[Florian Weimer <fweimer redhat com>]

On 05/15/2014 10:22 AM, Luca Bruno wrote:

> > am I correct in assuming that Vala is supposed to inherit the lack of
> > memory safety from C?  Or put differently: If there is Vala code that
> > does not guard callers from memory safety violations but it could do
> > so, this is not a problem because callers are generally expected to
> > fulfill such (implicit) preconditions.

> Vala inherits the problem of C, yes. You could certainly do some evil
> casts like in C. Vala however is certainly safer than C in many aspects,
> in other aspects however you have to know what you are doing and how
> Vala compiles down to C in certain cases.

Okay, good to know.  I asked because some of the offset/lengths check in 
the glib string library are a bit … off, and they can trigger C integer 
overflow, which is undefined.  But if Vala is general unsafe in this 
sense, it may not be necessary to fix these instances (it would be 
painful anyway because this code isn't in a dynamically linked).

--
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team