alt Hacker NewsI do not think this is niche in the slightest. I would very happily take a 2-4x slowdown for almost all of the web facing C software I run if I get guaranteed memory safety. I will be using at the very least fil-c openssh (and likely much more) on every machine I run.
Replies
Apologies ahead of time as this is pure FUD, That is I don't actually know what I am talking about but had an interesting thought.
Remember the Debian weak keys kerfuffle, That was caused because the Debian package maintainer saw a warning about using uninitialized memory, fixed it, and then it turned out that uninitialized memory was a critical seed for the openssl random number generator.
Anyhow my stupid FUD thought. is there a weak-key equivalent bug that shows up now that your C compiler is memory safe?
Sure, that makes sense. The point I’m making is just that from an engineering perspective, that also implies that there is no longer any reason for that software you’re running to be written in C at all.