| ▲ | mrweasel 2 days ago | |||||||
The language plays a role, but I think the best example of software with very few bugs is something like qmail and that's written in C. qmail did have bugs, but impressively few. Write code that carefully however is really not something you just do, it would require a massive improvement of skills overall. The majority of developers simply aren't skilled enough to write something anywhere near the quality of qmail. Most software also doesn't need to be that good, but then we need to be more careful with deployments. The fact that someone just installs Wordpress (which itself is pretty good in terms of quality) and starts installing plugins from un-trusted developers indicates that many still doesn't have a security mindset. You really should review the code you deploy, but I understand why many don't. | ||||||||
| ▲ | PaulHoule 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
I was qmail fanbois back in the day and loved how djb wrote his own string handling library. I built things with qmail that were much more than an email server (think cgi-bin for web servers) and knew the people who ran the largest email installation in the world (not sure how good they were about opt-in…) Djb didn’t allow forking and repackaging so quail did not keep up with an increasingly hostile environment where it got so bad that when the love letter virus came out it was insufficient to add content filtering to qmail and I had to write scripts that blocked senders at the firewall. Security was no longer a 0 and 1 problem, it was certainly possible to patch up and extend qmail to survive in that environment but there was something to say for having it all in one nice package…. And once the deliverability crisis started, I gave up on running email servers entirely. | ||||||||
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