153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
Just skimming through the Solidity docs, I see a lot of unwise decisions there aside from the weird visibility defaults.<p>All state is mutable by default (this includes struct fields, array elements, and locals). Functions can mutate state by default. Both are overridable by explicit specifiers, much like C++ "const", but you have to remember to do so. Even then, the current implementation doesn't enforce this for functions.<p>Integers are fixed-size and wrap around, so it's possible to have overflow and underflow bugs. Granted, with 256 bits of precision by default that's harder to do than usual... but still pretty easy if you e.g. do arithmetic on two inputs.<p>Operators have different semantics depending on whether the operands are literals or not. For example, 1/2 is 0.5, but x/y for x==1 and y==2 is 0. Precision of the operation is also determined in this manner - literals are arbitrary-precision, other values are constrained by their types.<p>Copy is by reference or by value depending on where the operands are stored. This is implicit - the operation looks exactly the same in code, so unless you look at declarations, you don't know what it actually does. Because mutability is pervasive, this can can have far-reaching effects.<p>Map data type doesn't throw on non-existing keys, it just returns the default value.<p>The language has suffixes for literals to denote various units (e.g. "10 seconds" or "1000 ether"). This is purely syntactic sugar, however, and is not reflected in the type system in any way, so "10 second + 1000 ether" is valid code.<p>Statements allow, but do not require, braces around bodies. This means that dangling "else" is potentially an issue, as is anything else from the same class of bugs (such as the infamous Apple "goto fail" bug).<p>Functions can be called recursively with no special effort, but the stack size is rather limited, and it looks like there are no tail calls. So there's the whole class of bugs where recursion depth is defined by contract inputs.<p>Order of evaluation is not defined for expressions. This in a language that has value-returning mutating operators like ++!<p>Scoping rules are inherited from JS, meaning that you can declare variables inside blocks, but their scope is always the enclosing function. This is more of an annoyance than a real problem, because they don't have closures, which is where JS makes it very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with this approach to scoping.