[cap-talk] Dan Bernstein's qmail security lessons paper

[Rob Meijer]

On Mon, December 17, 2007 04:38, James A. Donald wrote:
>  > It's my impression that Java is arguably the dominant
>  > platform for web services, in the enterprise world.
>  > How do you reconcile that with your view of Java?
>
> The choice in practice is between PHP, Perl, Java and
> C++.  If you write in C++, you will get memory leaks,
> and your server will grind to a halt.

This is a prety strong statement. There are tools like valgrind
that are very helpfull in eliminating memory leaks, and there
are smart pointer types in both stl and boost that help prevent
many of the sources of memory leaks with C++.
Further the idea that Java programs don't have memory leaks is
something that is based on an oversimplification, Java programs
in practice can leak memory, and if they do they are often harder
to locate than C++ memory leaks.
There are multiple reasons why C++ is less suitable for many web based
applications, but IMO memory leaks should not be considdered as such.

Rob