C with Safety - Cyclone

Paul Smith writes: "New Scientist is carrying a story about a redesigned version of the programming language C called Cyclone from AT&T labs. "The Cyclone compiler identifies segments of code that could eventually cause such problems using a "type-checking engine". This does not just look for specific strings of code, but analyses the code's purpose and singles out conflicts known to be potentially dangerous.""

Comments

But, I like being unsafe!

[mberman]

one of the main things i use C for is when i want to be unsafe. C lets you fuck with the system in completely arbitrary ways. i program in C because i'm smarter than the compiler, so i want it to let me do whatever i want, and assume i know what i'm doing. when you need to write code that needs to be safe, and you want the compiler to double check everything you do, use java or ML or something...

No, Java is for writing applications

[bill_mcgonigle]

Java is great for applications, but you'd never want to start writing device drivers or a virtual memory system in Java. For that you need c, which is basically just a step up from assembly language. Still, people make mistakes, and this will help them.

Of course, if you're still writing applications in c, you're just asking for it. Cyclone might help, but you probably have other issues anyway.