Quote from: grau on December 21, 2014, 10:40:15 AM

BTW what about the heartbleed bug in SSL was it not in Bitcoin core?

It was an issue in OpenSSL (bitcoind doesn't expose SSL to the public in a default, or even sane, configuration at least). Every other language also depends on system libraries too. So the language Bitcoin core was written in was irrelevant in this example.

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Unfortunatelly you only use your intelligence to pinpoint inaccuracy in my sentences.

I'm sorry you feel that I'm nitpicking, but I'm not trying to.

So far our experience in this space is that there is more irresponsible and broken software written in higher level languages, there has been virtually no issues in this space from cryptographic weaknesses (or even conventional software security) in Bitcoin applications written in C / C++. I agree that sounds somewhat paradoxical... but it's not that shocking: The security of these systems depends on the finest details of the behaviour of each part of the software and the interactions, when your system obscures the details some extra work is required to review though the indirection. This somewhat offsets the gains. In cryptographic (and especially consensus) systems it's much harder to "fail safe" and a much wider spectrum of unexpected behaviour is actually bad and exploitable. Languages like Java make some kinds of errored software "more safe" when the software is incorret, but making software more correct is still something that is largely not reaching production industrial software development yet (languages with dependant types and facilities for formal analysis seem like they _may_ result in more correct software).

There is no replacement for hard work and many view higher level languages as an escape from drudgery, so there may be some language selection bias from the attitude of the authors that has nothing to do with the language itself. In any case, I think your barb was misplaced, at least in this thread: We've seen bad RNG behaviour from Java software several times, and not just in system libraries. (And not just RNG safety, also things like attempts at full node code being shattered by underlying crypto libraries bubbling up null pointer exceptions that cause false block rejections which would have created forks if it were widely used).

(I do agree though that using untyped languages is basically suicide for any, even moderately large, system where correctness matters.)