use after free error (trying to walk with one leg missing)
He forgot to allocate his leg.
Also, it looks like he pointed to foot correctly. I’m surprised he didn’t shoot his hand, the pointer to a pointer to a foot.
This is why I stick to Rust. The gender affirming surgery takes some getting used to, but at least I have both legs.
I’ve heard this trope before but I’m skeptic. I’m not a C expert but I can’t believe memory bugs in that language are so much more benign than in C++.
With C, you need to carefully craft your own gun with just iron ingots and a hammer. You will shoot yourself in the foot, but at least you’ll have the knowledge that it was your craftsmanship that led to it.
With C++, there are already prebuilt guns and tons of modifications that you can combine at will. If you shove it in the right way, you can make a flintlock shoot a 50 cal, but don’t complain when your whole leg gets obliterated.
It is indeed a trope and a mostly false one - C++ introduces more dramatic ways to footgun yourself but a plethora of tools to make it easier to avoid them - in particular the built in library functions actually encourage good C++ programming practices…
Well, let’s just ignore
gets().
We need an updated version
Rust:
- You find a predefined foot shooting function, but it’s marked as unsafe and someone forgot to document what the safety contract was. You write up an unsafe block anyway and pass that function ownership of a bullet and a mutable reference to your foot, and get a segfault.
- You search crates.io for “gun” and find a crate called
pewpew. It looks incredibly spiffy. It supports semi or automatic fire, being used with or without a turret (or on a user-supplied turret) and with any number of middlewares for storing the bullets and transforming them on their way to the firing chamber. Unfortunately you can’t shoot yourself with it because your foot doesn’t implement the relevant autotraits.
Systemd:
- You create a service file for shooting yourself in the foot and set it to run at system startup. It seems to work, but after a cold boot, sometimes your foot has a hole in it and sometimes it doesn’t. After hours of debugging, you discover that this is because sometimes the gun service starts up and fires its bullet at nothing before the foot service finishes initializing and puts itself in the way. To resolve this you will likely need to edit the source code of your foot to make it support systemd-notify.
