[pfx] Re: Postfix code scanning with Claude
Wietse Venema via Postfix-users <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.mail.postfix.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Sad Clouds via Postfix-users: > On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:44:00 -0400 (EDT) > Wietse Venema via Postfix-users <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Sad Clouds via Postfix-users: > > > On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:20:48 -0400 (EDT) > > > Wietse Venema via Postfix-users <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > On my request, Viktor scanned Postfix source with Anthropic's Claude > > > > Opus 4.6. > > > > > > There is a good paper on how programming languages like Ada help to > > > avoid large number of software defects associated with C/C++: > > > > > > https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/SafeSecureAdav2015-covered.pdf > > > > Problems that Postfix does not appear to have. I'd like to remind > > you that not every software problem is caused by memory corruption. > > Examples: a security regression when the find command was > > re-implemented in Rust; data-dependent web bugs (XSS, CSRF, etc). > > You're correct, software defects can arise from many different sources, > such as unclear or incomplete requirements, poor design decisions, > logic mistakes, race conditions, etc. Not all of these issues are tied > to any particular programming language. > > However, at least in my experience, moving from C to Ada felt like going > from a horse-drawn cart to a space shuttle. Ada was designed with > software engineers in mind, and features such as strong typing, range > constraints, runtime checks, modularity through packages, generics, > exception handling, and built-in concurrency via tasks make it far more > suitable for developing complex applications. The comparison of ADA with a space shuttle is an apt one. However, I would prefer a more modern language such as Go which has first-party library support for much of today's networking. With Postfix I avoided the horse-drawn cart problem with an abstraction layer that takes up almost 50% of the code. qmail, a contemporary of Postfix, did a similar thing. Wietse _______________________________________________ Postfix-users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]