Re: Interning strings considered harmful (somewhat)

["Matthew P. Del Buono" <delbu9c1@...>]

Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Roberto Ierusalimschy:
>> Excluding malware, I do not think this situation happens enough to
>> justify any worry.
> 
> I know the argument: anybody who wants to take out your web server can
> just flood it with 5 Gbps of traffic (or more if necessary).
> 

I think you already have an issue if you're being flooded like that anyway.

> Would an uninterned string type introduce too many additional code
> paths in the VM?

Why make a change to the VM? Why can't you just do it yourself? The only
logical way to add an uninterned string type would be to enforce that
uninterned strings and interned strings are considered two distinct
types. Accordingly, uninterned strings are never equal to interned
strings, even if their contents are equal.

Following the above logic, we can implement uninterned strings trivially
as userdata. An __eq metamethod can be provided which passes off
execution to strcmp (additional work may be neccessary to handle strings
with zeros). We would use this userdata only for "insecure" strings,
that is, strings that the remote user can influence. If we need to test
between interned strings and our userdata, the userdata could provide a
method through __index that allows for comparison against a string.

Don't change what isn't broken. Userdata were made for special
situations and types just like this.

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Matthew P. Del Buono