Software Assurance Reference Dataset

Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Jun 26 13:25:12 PDT 2014


On 6/26/2014 2:50 AM, bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>
>> In general, stack overflow checking at compile time is the halting problem. It
>> needs a runtime check.
>
> There are several systems, including SPARK, that perform a conservative and
> apparently acceptable stack overflow check at compile time. If you don't agree
> with what I've written in my post, then please give a more detailed answer to
> the points I've written above.

Spark is a research language that does not work, as I've discovered and 
discussed with you before. It cannot be determined the max stack usage at 
compile time, again, this is the halting problem.


>> 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.


> In most other languages it's a "safety"
> problem, if your program execution has some importance.

I mean "safety" in the sense of being a security problem, which is the context 
of this thread.



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