Comment by shakna
6 days ago
Python's pathlib wouldn't help you here, it can encode the necessary bits. Especially with configparser - it's 20 year old configuration reader. Java's story is worse.
What part of this would be prevented by another language?
You'd need to switch your data format to something like json, toml, etc. to prevent this from the outset. But JSON was first standardised 25 years ago, and AJAX wasn't invented when this was written. JSON was a fledgling and not widely used yet.
I guess we had netrc - but that's not standardised and everyone implements it differently. Same story for INI.
There was XML - at a time when it was full of RCEs, and everyone was acknowledging that its parser would be 90% of your program. Would you have joined the people disparaging json at the time as reinventing xml?
This vulnerability is the fault of data formats not being common enough to be widely invented yet.
> What part of this would be prevented by another language?
> You'd need to switch your data format to something like json, toml, etc.
The part where if you wrote this in any modern languages ecosystem you would do this.
Yes, modern languages and their ecosystems likely did not exist back then. The lesson going forwards is that we shouldn't keep doing new things like we did back then.
Saying smithing metal by using a pair of hand driven bellows is inefficient isn't to say the blacksmiths ages ago who had no better option were doing something wrong.
Ok... So you're not saying C is a problem.
You're saying every few years, we should torch our code and rewrite from scratch, using new tools.
... Enjoy your collapsing codebase. I'll stick with what works, thanks.
What an absurdly bad faith interpretation. I never said anything to even suggest abandoning old code.
As demonstrated by vulnerabilities like the one in the article, C (and its ecosystem) doesn't "work", so I'm glad to hear that you won't be sticking with that for new projects going forwards.
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