On Wednesday, 7 February 2018 at 13:29:04 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
Walter's got a new post up! It's the first in a new series on
the benefits of BetterC mode. In this one, he talks about
solving the fencepost problem (off-by-one errors) with D's
arrays.
While an enjoable read, I fear we are aiming too low.
Other languages like Rust or C# (or Java) have bounds check. Plus
we probably lose it in release mode, which is the mode where
lurking bugs are discovered usually days after development ;)
Some of these languages would prevent it on the VM level/compiler
level, leaving no way to shoot yourself in the foot.
If we have bounds checks by default it looks silly to have
pointer arithmetic enabled by default. It’s like “we are safe
from this problem, as long as you write code using this primitive
not the other one”, which is basically safety by convention.
