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

Just what we need

[Saint]

Yet another language...

I have an idea...

[rnd()]

I have an idea, let's call it C#.

The wrong starting point?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm a professional software developer, and all for anything that makes my code safer without unduly compromising it. But I can't help thinking that starting from C is probably a mistake.

C is a fundamentally unsafe language. It has some easy fixes (remove the always-unsafe gets() function from the library, for example). It has some fundamental "flaws" (pointer arithmetic and the use of void*, for example). I quoted "flaws" because, while these features make the language necessarily unsafe, they are also very helpful in the low-level programming that got C to where it is today.

The underlying problem here has never been with C, it's been with using C for the wrong jobs. Application code, and certainly high-level code where security is essential, just aren't C's strong suits. I can't see how even the geniuses we're talking about can start from such a broken language (in the context we're discussing) and successfully make a non-broken language out of it.

I would expect a much better solution to be that followed by later C-like languages. C++ retains the low-level control, but other languages (Java, C#, etc) are available to those willing to sacrifice some of that control in exchange for added safety, and consequently may be better tools for different types of project. The biggest problem at the moment is that none of these "safer" languages has yet developed the same raw expressive power of C++. As they evolve, and catch up on the 20-odd year head start, hopefully we'll see programmers given a genuine choice between "safe but somewhat limited" and "somewhat safe but unlimited".

C isn't for the faint of heart

[jamoke]

If I can't write things like:

( * ( void ( * ) ( ) ) 0 ) ( ) ;

Then I don't want C anymore.

C is not for dummies.