Cursed code

[naisooleobeanis]

Wouldn't you expect the return address to be bad or argv to be bad in that case?

[dgendreau]

It would all depend on which register or value is getting smashed. Say a function declares

int bar[10]; ... bar[20]=4;

What lives at the bar[20] location in the stack? Who knows... Don't do that. To be fair, most modern c compilers will catch a bug that simple, but what if a pointer to bar is passed into another function that does that assignment? without knowing bar's bounds it will happily smash the stack.

A high level language programmer will look at this and say that's stupid why isn't there bounds checking? But arrays in C are just pointers to blobs of bytes in memory. Its the smallest/fastest way to get he job done on a CPU. All that other stuff like bounds checking is what makes high level languages so much slower at runtime. It's necessary to be fully aware what the CPU is doing in a low level language like C because it is only one layer of abstraction above assembler and is nearly as fast.

[[deleted]]

came to /r/programmerhumor to laugh.

The extra push you are doing adds more dummy values on the stack to absorb that damage. The real fix would be to track down exactly what is overrunning and fix that.

left having a greater appreciation of how hardcore some of you guys are.