Re: [PHP-DEV] Categorising engine bugs caused by nonsensical/malicious callback handlers as Undefined Behaviour and to not fix them

[email protected] (Ilia)
Newsgroups php.internals
Message-ID <CALkpNnQjPPAr703D0ELpwfGODy1qSBz6pnJXYEc3bUkatN1NRA@mail.gmail.com>
>
> While having C memory bugs is *far* from ideal, the fact that a majority
> of them will disappear with PHP 9 when deprecation are removed and warnings
> are promoted to Error makes this whackamole bug chase a waste of time.
> Especially as these issues have been present for *decades* and nobody
> except fuzzers and LLMs have run into these issues.
>
> As such I'd like to hear the opinions of Internals on if we can come to a
> consensus (ideally without an RFC...) that registering callbacks that mess
> around with state in non-intended ways is Undefined Behaviour (UB).
>
> While UB is far from desirable, it is not unprecedented in PHP.
>

My perspective is that memory issues in PHP that cause crashes are
generally not good and should be resolved wherever possible. While PHP 9
may address many of these issues, it is still far off and production code
migration will take even longer. Therefore, fixes now are still relevant.
That being said, I agree that fixes addressing odd/unlikely corner-cases
with a measurable performance impact are probably not-desired. My
suggestion is that this is handles on a case-by-case basis, balancing
performance impact to crash likelyhood.

-- 
Ilia Alshanetsky
Technologist, CTO, Entrepreneur
E: [email protected]
T: @iliaa
B: http://ilia.ws
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.