On Sunday, 2 November 2014 at 06:39:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
This is not a solution. C has successfully resisted all
attempts to add bounds checking.
That was a student project, but the paper presented an overview
of techniques which is why I linked to it. A realistic solution
is probably at 10-50 times slower on regular hardware and is
suitable for debugging, and you can probably improve it a lot
using global semantic analysis.
To quote the Nasa paper's conclusion:
«We have shown in this paper that the array bound checking of
large C programs can be performed with a high level of precision
(around 80%) in nearly the same time as compilation. The key to
achieve this result is the specialization of the analysis towards
a particular family of software.»
So no, C has not resisted all attempts at adding bounds checking.
People are doing it.
