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

Legacy Savior? A culture fix would be better...

[Embedded Geek]

In my shop, we do everything on a shoestring, kludging together tons of C legacy code from multiple generations of our products. We take an application that ran on a homebrewed executive and stick it on an RTOS, spoofing it so it doesn't know the difference. We grab code written on an 8 bit microcontroller and port it to our 32 bit x86 with minimal testing. Given all this, my first thought at reading the article was to raise three cheers. The idea of making a system already written a lot safer... I can hardly find the words.

Then I got chewing on it and realized something: when I came on board and suggested running lint on our code, I was shot down by both the rank & file and by management (who each blamed the other). When I suggested a concerted effort to rewrite our code to eliminate or justify (in comments) every warning our compiler spewed on a build, I got a similar reaction.

Don't get me wrong. I think cyclone still sounds great, especially the pattern matching and polymorphism indicated on its home site. If it can gain some momentum, it stands to have a real place (niche?) in dealing with legacy systems. For my shop, though, I fear much of the value would be wasted. Until we change our motto from "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over" we're going to continue repeating our mistakes.