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Memory safety defects tend to manifest themselves in obvious ways. A few unit tests, and some work in memory sanitizes will find them.


This is empirically not true. A look through https://twitter.com/lazyfishbarrel confirms this.


The exceptions tend to escape notice for years. They get a lot of attention (and are often really hard to fix unlike the early ones), but I stand by my statement: most are easily found and fixed - but they are also fixed early in development so you don't hear about them.


If it's so obvious then why am I receiving security patches for my Linux desktop almost every day?


Many reasons.

There is a long tail of exceptions to my statement, hard to find things that escape notice for years.

There are a lot of security issues that are not really memory safety as we are talking about here. (many are memory safety in a way that has nothing to do with getting your allocate/free wrong - using uninitialized memory for example). Some of them are subtle new attacks that were just discovered and now need to be mitigated.




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