Re: [MiNT] XaAES crash errors

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On Sunday 06 December 2009, Paul Wratt wrote:
>> Certainly not, you already have obtained nice results.
>> But I believe everyone will agree, the way you asked your questions
>> about C was quite scary. Because a little mistake on some pointer stuff
>> can lead to disasters. That's all.
...
> yeah, its the lingo used to describe and ask questions, more than
> anything

No, it's the thing that if one doesn't have the experience and know exactly
what he's doing when dealing with memory allocation, pointers etc, he can
create issues that take weeks to debug although the implemented feature
itself would be "done" in few hours.

And before such issues are found, they could have caused random/unknown
data loss and general instability.

For example something like this:
	char array[SOME_SIZE];
	... code ...
	return array;

Is pretty evil.   (Corrupted stack is really hard to debug.)


	- Eero

(Dealing with code from somebody inexperienced isn't really something that
I would personally like to do on my free time although I sometimes have to
do at it work.  Although one reviews, re-reviews and debugs code coming from
such sources one always wonders what other landmines are still hiding in
the code waiting to be "found".  For write-once stuff it's sometimes OK,
not for something one wants to maintain.)