Comment by himata4113
3 days ago
There are too many opensource projects that show that even with good engineering discipline humans are flawed creatures.
Memory safety is just little thing that makes sure that when you write code at 4am that it will not leak memory via trivial mistakes such as forgetting to free something, freeing something twice or passing a freed pointer. I believe AI agents shine here the most because the they do not get tired and are getting pretty damn predictable.
How many bugs in qmail though?
I don't think we should set our expectations based on an extreme outlier. qmail is special, and we can't expect most software to get to its level of security/safety.
Put another way: if you have to rely on programmer skill or attention to detail in order to guarantee something, that will always be a losing bet, on average. The existence of a tiny percentage of programmers that can clear that high bar does not make it a valid strategy.
Splitting programs into mutually untrusting modules is a plausible alternative to memory safety in programming languages.
Also in a program similar to qmail, memory safety alone is not sufficient, a lot of bugs in sendmail were related to complexity issues.
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Why can't we write everything like qmail?
It had one bad cve it seems, but that's exactly what I mean. It only takes one mistake, of course you can learn and never make those mistakes again, however, that is an unrealistic expectation in software that receives hundreds of feature updates a year especially when it comes to core applications as basic as communication when it wants to support image previews, reels and whatnot.
There will always be one, so "it only takes one" is meaningless and invalid. That leaves less is better than more, and any form of less is as good as any other form of less.
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