Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I think you can agree that being able to see the code, and detect patched builds, makes it much more risky to pull something like this.


What percentage of people have the requisite knowledge to do that? The Heartbleed bug was in open source software for over a year before anyone noticed it.


This could be avoided by only running programs written in safer languages. C/++ allows for very very hard to spot bugs that can cause serious issues like heartbleed. You would have to try a lot harder to hide such a thing in a haskell program .


Since all five widely implemented platforms (iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and Linux) and most mainstream open source software is written in C, that would be a tough lift. Also since there are far more people who know C than Haskell, that kind of gets rid of the “many eyes” defense.


There may be fewer people able to read haskell but I would say fewer are needed to verify that a program doesn't have unexpected behavior. Also languages like rust are becoming bigger which should help.

Sure there is a lot of C floating around but there is a solution in sight and there is some amount of effort being put in to rewriting things in Rust.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: