Scenario: OpenSSL in D language, pros/cons

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On Sunday, 4 May 2014 at 08:34:20 UTC, Daniele M. wrote:
> I have read this excellent article by David A. Wheeler:
>
> http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/heartbleed.html
>
> And since D language was not there, I mentioned it to him as a 
> possible good candidate due to its static typing and related 
> features.
>
> However, now I am asking the community here: would a D 
> implementation (with GC disabled) of OpenSSL have been free 
> from Heartbleed-type vulnerabilities? Specifically 
> http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/126.html and 
> http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/20.html as David mentions.
>
> I find this perspective very interesting, please advise :)

While D is a somewhat safer language by *default*, it makes it 
fairly easy to escape from the safe part of the language and 
write unsafe code (array bounds checking can be turned off even 
for @safe code). Seeing as the OpenSSL devs went as far as to 
write an a buggy, custom implementation of malloc for a speed 
gain, turning off array bounds checking and ignoring @safe seems 
like the first thing they would do. The only language I would 
really trust is one in which it is impossible to write unsafe 
code, because you can then know that the developers can't use 
such unsafe hacks, even if they wanted to.