FWIW, cppfront would be the same, IMHO. It allows C++ syntax, and it just passes it through verbatim. Only transforms “syntax 2” into today’s C++. And Herb Sutter very much says that what it does is based on the papers that he’s presented for standardization, and that he’d like this approach (new syntax) land into today’s C++ compilers and the standard.

cppfront is the only one that I thought had a chance till recently. The presentations from Sean Baxter seem to finally make the community see it on a positive light (I’ve seen posts on Reddit being removed on the premise of not being C++, which I think it’s a bit unfair), so that’s good.

I’d have to dig it, but I think it said that it added the PID and the uninitialized memory to add a bit more data to the entropy pool in a cheap way. I honestly don’t get how that additional data can be helpful. To me it’s the very opposite. The PID and the undefined memory are not as good quality as good randomness. So, even without Debian’s intervention, it was a bad idea. The undefined memory triggered valgrind, and after Debian’s patch, if it weren’t because of the PID, all keys would have been reduced to 0 randomness, which would have probably raised the alarm much sooner.

no more patching fuzzers to allow that one program to compile. Fix the program

Agreed.

Remember Debian’s OpenSSL fiasco? The one that affected all the other derivatives as well, including Ubuntu.

It all started because OpenSSL did add to the entropy pool a bunch uninitialized memory and the PID. Who the hell relies on uninitialized memory ever? The Debian maintainer wanted to fix Valgrind errors, and submitted a patch. It wasn’t properly reviewed, nor accepted in OpenSSL. The maintainer added it to the Debian package patch, and then everything after that is history.

Everyone blamed Debian “because it only happened there”, and definitely mistakes were done on that side, but I surely blame much more the OpenSSL developers.

Is it, really? If the whole point of the library is dealing with binary files, how are you even going to have automated tests of the library?

The scary thing is that there is people still using autotools, or any other hyper-complicated build system in which this is easy to hide because who the hell cares about learning about Makefiles, autoconf, automake, M4 and shell scripting at once to compile a few C files. I think hiding this in any other build system would have been definitely harder. Check this mess:

  dnl Define somedir_c_make.
  [$1]_c_make=`printf '%s\n' "$[$1]_c" | sed -e "$gl_sed_escape_for_make_1" -e "$gl_sed_escape_for_make_2" | tr -d "$gl_tr_cr"`
  dnl Use the substituted somedir variable, when possible, so that the user
  dnl may adjust somedir a posteriori when there are no special characters.
  if test "$[$1]_c_make" = '\"'"${gl_final_[$1]}"'\"'; then
    [$1]_c_make='\"$([$1])\"'
  fi
  if test "x$gl_am_configmake" != "x"; then
    gl_[$1]_config='sed \"r\n\" $gl_am_configmake | eval $gl_path_map | $gl_[$1]_prefix -d 2>/dev/null'
  else
    gl_[$1]_config=''
  fi

PyQt.