Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Thoughts on type safety and crypto RNGs
by
gmaxwell
on 24/12/2014, 20:23:37 UTC
I'm mainly concerned about whether or not using C(++) with manual memory management is acceptable practice. Screwing up manual memory management exposes you to the king of all implicit details: what garbage happens to be in memory at that very moment.
We mostly do not use manual memory management in Bitcoin core. Virtually all use of delete is in explicit destructors, most things are just RAII. I looked a while back and think found only something like three or four instances of use delete outside of destructors, and I assume those cases will all be changed the next time they're touched (e.g. examples include the wallet encryption, which hasn't been touched in years).

(I thought it was really weird of Mike brought up manual memory management, I see I made an error in not correcting him.