On Sun, 06 Jun 2004 16:15:43 -0400, Robert Reif wrote: > Interesting read. I would have thought Microsoft would have > checked if the memory range was already mapped and had the > proper access permission rather than just accessing it and catching > the page fault. The whole point of the check is to prevent a > problem, not cause it. It's hard to believe that's what they are doing. > Explains a lot though.
Yeah. The bit about accidentally touching the guard page was scary, especially as that sort of mistake would be so easy to make and is so subtle. Once again I find myself cursing the ridiculous levels of fault tolerance in these APIs - if an application passes bogus pointers into something like GTK they either get a non-fatal assertion and the function returns, or the app crashes with a helpful backtrace to show you what you did wrong. I expect these APIs were thrown into Win32 one afternoon by a bored (paranoid) programmer who was in the "we can't trust the user" school of thought, without much review or thinking through, and written in the easiest way possible. Then other teams began using them because they were there and hey, it's so easy, why not?
