Why is gnome written in c

Both styles have their pros and cons. The most important things is to be consistent with the surrounding code. Both styles are perfectly readable and consistent when you get used to them. You should resist your inclination to reindent everything, or to use an inconsistent style for your patch.

Do not ever change the size of tabs in your editor ; leave them as 8 spaces. Instead, set the indentation size as appropriate for the code you are editing. When writing in something other than Linux kernel style, you may even want to tell your editor to automatically convert all tabs to 8 spaces, so that there is no ambiguity about the intended amount of space. In GNU style, if either side of an if … else statement has braces, both sides should, to match up indentation:.

If the single statement covers multiple lines, e. Such long conditions are usually hard to understand. A good practice is to set the condition to a boolean variable, with a good name for that variable. Another way is to move the long condition to a function. Nested if , in which case the block should be placed on the outermost if :. While curly braces for function definitions should rest on a new line they should not add an indentation level:.

Do not check boolean values for equality. By using implicit comparisons, the resulting code can be read more like conversational English. For example:. As outlined in the following sections, a manual code audit uncovered two distinct memory corruption vulnerabilities in the handling of these encoding schemes. That function first reads the message type and then continues to process the rest of the message accordingly. Framebuffer updates are transmitted in messages of type rfbFramebufferUpdate.

These messages will then contain information about the number of rectangular framebuffer updates contained in the message, and for each rectangle, the data encoding e. The string BPP in the function name will be expanded by the C preprocessor into three different functions for handling frame buffer updates with 8, 16 or 32 bits of color information per pixel. As shown in the listing, after reading the header from the socket via ReadFromRFBServer , its field nBytes is used to set the signed integer variable toRead.

Afterward, the code reads the amount of data specified by toRead from the socket:. A malicious VNC server is able to fully control the value of the toRead variable, including negative values. As ReadFromRFBServer expects an unsigned integer value, the implicit type conversion ultimately leads to a read call with an overly large count value.

The exact amount of data that is overwritten can be controlled by closing the underlying socket connection early. That value is used by the function to make a number of assumptions regarding the exact format — e. Later, the function ReadCompactLen is invoked to read the value of compressedLen from the underlying socket:. ReadCompactLen allows the server to specify a length value that uses up to three bytes.

The most significant bits of the first one or two bytes specify whether another byte follows. As the maximum size of compressedLen can exceed the size of the buffer struct member, the server is able to overflow said buffer and fully control the subsequent members of the rfbClient struct as well as adjacent heap memory.

This includes pointers through which an arbitrary write primitive can be achieved as well as function pointers that allow hijacking of the control flow. The argument for this function is a client object that is configured to read framebuffer updates from stdin. Now there are some parts of Gnome pushing for Rust. Fortunately for Gnome, Rust may be good enough to actually become a final destination for them, but even then not many people seem to be using it?

Gnome has been searching for a C replacement for too long, maybe they should stick to one language, and create a really solid platform in order to attract more people instead of switching targets every few years. There have been many discussions about this.

Mainly, the reason is a philosophical one. C was invented as a simple language for system development not so much application development.

In the end, it's a historical issue. Most application stuff is written in C, because most Kernel stuff is written in C.

And since back then most stuff was written in C, people tend to use the original languages. This has been discussed on kerneltrap some time ago. One nice explanation that can be quoted from this thread is a response by yoshi quoting directly :. On the other hand, "most of Linux programs" is quite misleading. Take a look at graphical applications. Python is getting more and more ground especially in GUI environments on Linux. About the same thing that's happening with Windows and.

After reading the following email from Linus Torvalds the creator of linux. I can't help thinking the answer above is incorrect. While one may disagree with him, it's difficult to overstate the influence he has had on the linux operating system.