Elazar Leibovich :: UB effects on real world projects

Presented at Core C 2023 conference Undefined behavior and its liberal adoption by compilers is pretty unique to C/C . Number of so-called UBs and their implication is an order of magnitude larger compared to similar languages, e.g., Ada, and is the source of hard to find bugs as well as security vulnerabilities. Scott Meirs popularized the notion of UB summoning “nasal demons“, yet most of the noses of veteran C programmers are intact. To understand and mitigate UB in large code bases, it is crucial to understand how the UB can affect your code. We will survey real life bugs and security vulnerabilities, and how exactly they affect the code. We will show several categories of misbehavior that could be caused by UB, and will try to bound the implication of it. ----- Elazar Leibovich GPU @nextsilicon, storage @vastdata, virtualization @Ravello (RIP), big data @Akamai, 🆓 ❤️perf ❤️µarch