Software Assurance Reference Dataset

[bearophile via Digitalmars-d]

(Sorry for the very late answer.)

Walter Bright:

>>> Stack overflows are not safety problems when a guard page is 
>>> used past the end
>>> of the stack.
>> It's not a safety problem in Erlang/Rust, because those 
>> languages are designed to manage such failures in a good way.
>
> Please explain.

The idea comes from Erlang language (and perhaps Erlang has coped 
it from something else), and then Rust copied it (and indeed, if 
you look at the "Influenced by" list here, you see Erlang, and it 
Rust has copied only the Erlang feature I am discussing here: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_language ).

Erlang systems must be extremely reliable, they run 
telecommunication systems that must just always work, with only 
seconds or minutes of downtime every year. But programs contains 
errors and bugs, so to face this problem Erlang (and now Rust) 
has chosen a curious strategy.

The description, see "4.3 Error handling philosophy" at page 
104-109, a PDF file:
http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

It's also a bit explained here, at the "3. What is 
fault-tolerance" section:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3172542/are-erlang-otp-messages-reliable-can-messages-be-duplicated/3176864#3176864

Some more technical info:
http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.html

Bye,
bearophile