Re: [ANN] Win32 API wrappers - General API 1.0.7 patch1 beta

[Peter Odding <xolox@...>]

Diego Nehab wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > > On the flip side, when you expose all the primitives, a higher level 
> > > API can be written in Lua.
> > >
> > >  - Peter Odding
> >
> > I agree.
>
> Damn it, I sent the message before writing the rest. As I said, I agree 
> too.
>
> The only problem is that, according to Lua's philosophy, it
> should not be possible to crash an application from Lua. Exposing the 
> bare Win32 API might not be compatible with
> this philosophy.
>
> Regards,
> Diego.

I couldn't agree more, and go to quite a bit of trouble to avoid my own binary 
modules from crashing on invalid input.

Continuing on high- vs. low-level API advantages: when a module writer decides 
to expose the primitives I think he/she essentially gives over control to users 
of the module, and will have to accept the consequences (if you don't validate 
all input your module can crash and take the Lua interpreter with it).

Last note, if any of you are running Windows, try lua.exe -e "os.date'%e'". Does 
that crash? Because it does for me, on all >= XP SP2 installations I've tried. 
This means it's already possible to crash `plain' Lua on Windows, at least the 
os library, given an invalid (according to Microsoft's CRT) format string. Of 
course no-one could expect the Lua authors to implement (localized) date 
formatting independent of the CRT, but this goes to show that input validation 
is important.

 - Peter Odding

PS. Please don't take the lua.exe -e "os.date'%e'" comment as FUD against Lua!