The Daily WTF

There’s plenty of room for debate about what specific poor choices in history lead to the most bugs today. Was it the billion dollar mistake of allowing null pointers? Is it the absolute mess that is C memory management? Or is it C-style strings and all the attendant functions and buffer-overruns they entail?

A developer at Jay‘s company had been porting some C++ code to a new platform. That developer left, and the wheel-of-you-own-this-now spun and landed on Jay. The code was messy, but mostly functional. Jay was able to get it building, running, and then added a new feature. It was during testing that Jay noticed that some fields in the UI weren’t being populated.

Jay broke out a memory analyzer tool, and it popped out warnings on lines where strlcpy was being called. Now that was odd, as strlcpy is the “good” way to copy strings, with guarantees

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