[Toybox] Toybox bc's transcendental and irrational functions produce incorrect results, memory leaks and exhibit brute force algorithmic complexity.

[Rob Landley]

On 08/28/2018 01:25 PM, Ivo van Poorten wrote:
> If out-of-memory causes your whole system to crash, you have other
> problems.

Out of memory is bad, and the kernel guys keep fiddling with the OOM killer so
it doesn't reliably trigger. (I had to power cycle my netbook over the weekend
because it had gone so deep into swap thrashing it wouldn't let me ctrl-alt-f1
to "pkill -f renderer" for over an hour. The mouse cursor position updated twice
while I was waiting, but that was it. Wheee.)

That said, "sed H /dev/zero" can blow up pretty big pretty fast. There's lots of
trivial ways to do that from the command line. (Anything that calls readline()
on /dev/null since NUL isn't a newline...)

The email itself said that you need to know a lot of the guts of the thing to
trigger a problem, I.E. it's high unlikely to hit the unaware. Yay fixing it,
but as priorities go? Pilot error and ulimit -m exists.

Rob