Comment by zozbot234
6 months ago
> Profiles, which Bjarne et al have had years to work on, will not provide memory safety
While I agree with this in a general sense, I think it ought to be quite possible to come up with a "profile" spec that's simply meant to enforce the language restriction/subsetting part of Safe C++ - meaning only the essentials of the safety checking mechanism, including the use of the borrow checker. Of course, this would not be very useful on its own without the language and library extensions that the broader Safe C++ proposal is also concerned with. It's not clear as of yet if these can be listed as part of the same "profile" specifications or would require separate proposals of their own. But this may well be a viable approach.
I have seen 3 different safe c++ proposals (most are not papers yet, but they are serious efforts to show what safe c++ could look like). However there is a tradeoff here. the full bower checker in C++ approach is incompatible with all current C+++ and so adopting it is about as difficult is rewriting all your code in some other language. The other proposals are not as safe, but have different levels of you can use this with your existing code. All are not ready to get added to C++, but they all provide something better and I'm hopeful that something gets into C++ (though probably not before C++32)
>the full bower checker in C++ approach is incompatible with all current C++
Circle is an implementation of C++ that includes a borrow checker and is 100% backwards compatible with C++:
https://www.circle-lang.org/site/index.html
That is one of of the three. It isn't really backward compatible because to take adventage of it you need to write\change a lot of code.
a nice attempt but I have millions of lines of c++ that isn't going away-
7 replies →
I've seen maybe twice that many. Did one myself once. It's possible to make forward progress, but to get any real safety you have to prohibit some things.