Making alloca more safe

Sean Kelly sean at invisibleduck.org
Tue Nov 17 08:45:28 PST 2009


Tomas Lindquist Olsen Wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Walter Bright
> <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> >
> > I suppose nobody much cares if it writes out a corrupted audio file. People
> > care very much if their airplane suddenly dives into the ground.
> >
> > Be that as it may, it is certainly possible to catch seg faults in an
> > exception handler and write files out. That would be an unacceptable
> > behavior, though, in a system that needs to be safe.
> >
> 
> You spent quite a bit of effort explaining that segfaults never cause
> memory corruption, so it seems fairly reasonable to assume that some
> parts of the application state could still be valid and useful not to
> throw away.

At the moment the segfault occurs, sure.  But if the process eats the segfault and continues, what happens?  If an app is programmed in such a way that segfaults are a part of normal processing (I worked on a DB that performed dynamic loading this way) that's one thing.  But other apps are almost definitely going to try and write data near 0x00 after such an occurrence.



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