Tuesday, July 26, 2011

64-bit errors in real programs

There is a great article on Intel's website about real programming errors in C/C++ that surfaced as bugs when the code was compiled and run as a 64-bit program. A fair proportion involve some sort of type casting that makes assumptions about pointer size, and many are subtle bugs that will only be triggered when memory allocation is > 4GB.

As 64-bit becomes the new norm I think we'll see a lot of buffer overflows and memory corruption bugs as a consequence of errors like these.

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