>because crypt in musl started returning "*" in some cases some years ago

In Rust, the type of the return value would be a `Result<T, E>`, which means the chain of events that led to this would never have started in the first place.

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my-huge-pony 2 hours ago | parent [-]

In C the return value would be NULL, except it was changed by musl at some point.

Edit: at the beginning, crypt always returned a value. So hypothetical Rust return type would be a String, and then it would be retained for backward compatibility. Or something else would happen, this is a complex logic bug triggered by a 25 year old chain of events.

	▲	realharo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The type of the value in C is `char`. That's what led some people to write code where it crashes without checks. Which is still their mistake. But if the type was something that can't be implicitly used like an always-present value, that would* have prevented the situation, even with those same people.