Sad Clouds via Postfix-users:
> On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:44:00 -0400 (EDT)
> Wietse Venema via Postfix-users <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Sad Clouds via Postfix-users:
> > > On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:20:48 -0400 (EDT)
> > > Wietse Venema via Postfix-users <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > > On my request, Viktor scanned Postfix source with Anthropic's Claude
> > > > Opus 4.6.
> > >
> > > There is a good paper on how programming languages like Ada help to
> > > avoid large number of software defects associated with C/C++:
> > >
> > > https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/SafeSecureAdav2015-covered.pdf
> >
> > Problems that Postfix does not appear to have. I'd like to remind
> > you that not every software problem is caused by memory corruption.
> > Examples: a security regression when the find command was
> > re-implemented in Rust; data-dependent web bugs (XSS, CSRF, etc).
>
> You're correct, software defects can arise from many different sources,
> such as unclear or incomplete requirements, poor design decisions,
> logic mistakes, race conditions, etc. Not all of these issues are tied
> to any particular programming language.
>
> However, at least in my experience, moving from C to Ada felt like going
> from a horse-drawn cart to a space shuttle. Ada was designed with
> software engineers in mind, and features such as strong typing, range
> constraints, runtime checks, modularity through packages, generics,
> exception handling, and built-in concurrency via tasks make it far more
> suitable for developing complex applications.
The comparison of ADA with a space shuttle is an apt one. However,
I would prefer a more modern language such as Go which has first-party
library support for much of today's networking. With Postfix I
avoided the horse-drawn cart problem with an abstraction layer that
takes up almost 50% of the code. qmail, a contemporary of Postfix,
did a similar thing.
Wietse
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