Comment by Gibbon1
5 years ago
The political aspect is why I suggest the solution is to just up and fire all those guys. More realistically Microsoft, Apple and Linus could just force the issue. Gets added to Visual C/C++, LLVM, and Gnu C as an extention. And then start polluting code bases and API's with it.
Microsoft is already kind of doing it, if you compile in debug mode, you get bounds checking in all STL types, and you can enable them in release builds as well.
But yeah, it only works if you use those types.
There are other divisions pushing for .NET and Rust systems code in Windows, but the political wars between WinDev and DevTools are quite well known, e.g. Longhorn (in .NET) vs WinRT (same thing just in COM).
Proper thing is bounds checking should be by default and you actually have to turn it off for hot path code. Because 99% of the code people write isn't memory or CPU bound. If a little used code path is sometimes throwing bounds exceptions you want that to get logged in production.
Check C.A.Hoare Turing award speech in 1981 regarding the use of bounds checking in the 60's and how customers of Algol compilers considered a legal offence to even turn them off.
libstdc++ also has a debug mode with bounds checking etc, although you have to enable it by defining _GLIBCXX_DEBUG: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/debug_mode.h...
Thanks for the heads up.
I read this line:
> Gets added to Visual C/C++, LLVM, and Gnu C as an extention.
And had to do a double-take because I thought you were talking about gets(3)…