Re: [boost] [Review] Fixed Strings review period extended

From: Eric Niebler (eric_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-01-30 20:34:33

David Abrahams wrote:
> 
> If you're going to go through code
> and replace fixed-sized char arrays on the stack with something more
> reliable, it makes no sense at all to go halfway and use something
> that is still going to give you problems when your input data is
> larger than you might have anticipated (or whatever).

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and disagree for the sake of 
discussion. You're ignoring failure mode. A string truncation bug is, in 
all likelyhood, less severe than a buffer overrun. If, for instance, 
there were a large monopolistic corporation trying to eliminate remote 
exploits from their ENORMOUS codebase, a switch to something like 
fixed_string might be significantly cheaper than reengineering their 
code to work with a growable string class.

A different approach to achieve the same ends might be to define 
overloads of the C string APIs that worked with std::string, so the 
migration of legacy code can actually eliminate bugs instead of making 
them less severe. Has this approach been considered?

-- 
Eric Niebler
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com