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C with Safety - Cyclone

Posted by michael on from the whirling-away-bugs dept.

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.""

2 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. New language? by LinuxDeckard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I always let out a bit of a grumble when a new programming language comes out; they seldom add anything truly new to programming. When I read that Cyclone was strikingly similar to C, I was intrigued enough to skim through the docs.

    Put bluntly, Cyclone seems to be little more than C for lazy programmers. Fat pointers for those who can't follow the logic of pointer arithmetic and *`H for those intimidated by malloc() is not a beneficial service.

    --

    UNIX *is* user-friendly. Its just more selective on who its friends are. --Scott Adams
  2. Static verification vs. type-safe languages by jdfekete · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hi,

    In 1999, the Ariane 5 launcher exploded a few seconds after leaving the ground. The faulty program, written in type-safe Ada, has been submited to a static program analyzer developped by Alain Deutsch at INRIA in France. The analyzer spotted the error right away!
    It was a number going out of range after too many iterations and wrapping back to 0.

    The verification technique used was based on abstract interpretation.
    This is just to say that even a strongly type-checked language can fail and that type checks, whether static or dynamic, are not the only way to catch bugs.

    Alain Deutsch has started a company called Polyspace that sells static verifiers for Ada and C (See www.polyspace.com). The idea is not to rewrite C or Ada but to spot potential bugs inside programs.
    I have no special interest in this company, (I know Alain Deutsch), but I mean that improving C does not imply removing the type-unsafe onstructs.