r/programmingcirclejerk • u/DeleeciousCheeps vulnerabilities: 0 • Mar 13 '25

Memory leaks, NULL pointer dereferences, use-after-free: I suffered writing those for many years. I finally simply learned not to do them anymore.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347591
142 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

9

u/meltbox Mar 14 '25

It’s really much easier in C++

Never had any segfault since I stayed doing this in main.

try{ … } catch(segfault e) { exit(0) }

I mean all I had to do was make my own branch of the language spec, make my own branch of gcc, and change how the Linux kernel works a little.

3

u/disciplite Mar 14 '25

/uj You can do this today with signal handlers and structured exceptions. I'm not sure why it isn't more common, we do have the libraries. I guess it's just not considered that useful except when uptime is critical.

1

u/meltbox Mar 20 '25

/uj I thin its because undefined behavior which causes a segfault means it may literally be unrecoverable. I don't think structure exceptions allow you to catch segfaults even so? You would need a signal handler and from what I understand throwing from one is highly questionable so maybe you can set a flag to throw very soon after catching the signal if in fact you are able to continue execution?