[CLOWNFISH-44] Immutable Strings can be changed from Perl

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: Perl
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Nikolas Wellnhofer
• Created: 16/May/15 16:52
• Updated: 16/May/15 18:30

Description

Perl can hold a reference to a string passed to Clownfish and subsequently change the string via this reference in a callback. This violates the assumption that Clownfish strings are immutable and can lead to crashes if the string buffer is reallocated.

This scenario is somewhat contrived but for a proper fix, I think there's no other way than to always copy Perl strings passed as arguments. Fortunately, newer Perls support copy-on-write strings (default since 5.20) which makes this operation cheap.