A Byte of Coding Issue 366

Howdy,

Here’s the issue.

C++ safety, in context

Published: 11 March 2024

Tags: c++, infosec

Herb Sutter discusses what he believes to be the best path forward towards making software (in this case written in C++) more secure.

Some highlights:

• less focus on the language itself, more focus on being forced to use “already-well-known safety rules and best practices by default”, with explicit opt out

• the four most urgent types of safety that need to be addressed: “type, bounds, initialization, and lifetime safety”

• basically programming languages themselves aren’t the problem, it’s how people use them (duh)

A journey of improvements to Neurosity’s Brain Operating System

Published: 22 February 2024

Tags: rust, optimization, embedded

Bruno de Carvalho describes some of the improvements he made to an embedded stack that resulted in a 70% stack size reduction, “75% lower NodeJS heap usage”, CPU no longer crashing, and 65% longer battery life.

Some highlights:

• Basic plan is to roll out quick wins to reduce issues for current customers, then work on structural corrections

• the device uses your geolocation to find out what country you’re in to filter out EEG noise specific to the region’s electricity wires (50Hz vs 60Hz, just a fun fact I thought was pretty cool)

• performance heavy parts were taken out from the main node js app and rewritten in rust

Making the most of your Shells History on Linux and macOS

Published: 18 February 2024

Tags: bash, zsh, terminal

Andreas Heck goes over some interesting commands you can use in bash and zsh to mess around with your history of commands.

Some highlights:

• CTRL + R to search through all old commands

• !! to execute last command again

• you can save history to a file and restore from a file with history -w and -r