Comment by pjmlp

6 months ago

Contrary to C standard library, all C++ compilers have provided safe versions of their standard libraries, predating C++98, enabled in debug mode.

Even if non standard, all major C++ compiler vendors have provided similar features on their standard library, and is now officially supported in C++26.

I have debugged enough C memory corruption issues with strings and arrays, that I would thought by now WG14 would actually care to fix the root cause, 40 years in.

5 comments

pjmlp

Reply
uecker  6 months ago

The C standard library does not have containers, so I do not see how this sentence makes any sense. The reality is that C++ STL is in practice not really safer than C arrays, and although you can activate bounds checking, there remain many gotchas. But I am happy to see that bounds checking is now becoming official with C++26. For C arrays you get bounds checking in practice with -fsanitize=bounds. For containers, you would need a library in C that does bounds checking. So in both languages it is possible to get bounds checking if you want to.

  • pjmlp  6 months ago

    A compiler extension only available in clang is not C, so nope, there is no solution available in ISO C, and apparently never will be one.

    Also to note that said extension only exists because Apple did the work WG14 did not bothered to do for the last 40 years, and as way to improve interop with safe Swift.