Comment by compsciphd

compsciphd Dec 13, 2025 parent

I could imagine code that did something like this for primatives

  secretStash := NewSecretStash()
  pString := secretStash.NewString()
  ....
  ....
  secretStash.Thrash()

yes, you now have to deal in pointers, but that's not too ugly, and everything is stored in secretStash so can iterate over all the types it supports and thrash them to make them unusable, even without the gc running.

mbreese Dec 13, 2025

I used to see this is bash scripts all the time. It’s somewhat gone out of favor (along with using long bash scripts).

If you had to prompt a user for a password, you’d read it in, use it, then thrash the value.

    read -p “Password: “ PASSWD
    # do something with $PASSWD
    PASSWD=“XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”

It’s not pretty, but a similar concept. (I also don't know how helpful it actually is, but that's another question...)

voodooEntity Dec 13, 2025

Thats even better than what i had in mind but agree also a good way to just scrumble stuff unusable ++

compsciphd OP Dec 13, 2025

I'm now wondering with a bit of unsafe, reflection and generics magic one could make it work with any struct as well (use reflection to instantiate a generic type and use unsafe to just overwrite the bytes)

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