How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

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1371 points yett | 1 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.244s | source

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amenghra ◴[23 Apr 25 18:08 UTC] No.43774928[source]▶

IMHO, if something isn’t part of the contract, it should be randomized. Eg if iteration order of maps isn’t guaranteed in your language, then your language should go out of its way to randomize it. Otherwise, you end up with brittle code: code that works fine until it doesn’t.

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ormax3 ◴[23 Apr 25 19:24 UTC] No.43775759[source]▶

>>43774928 #

one might argue that one of the advantages of languages like C is that you only pay for the features you choose to use, no unnecessary overhead like initializing unused variables

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1. pjc50 ◴[24 Apr 25 10:09 UTC] No.43780948[source]▶

>>43775759 #

However, the compiler does not tell you this. We're back to the problem that it's possible to have a "working" C program that relies on UB and will therefore break at some point, but the tools will not yell at you for doing this. Whereas in Java or C# you get warnings or errors for using maybe-uninitialized variables.

Also, scanf should be deprecated. Terrible API. Never use scanf or sscanf etc. We managed to get "gets()" deprecated, time to spread that to other parts of the API.

atoi() or atof() etc. work OK, but really you need a parser.

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