After reading this post the idea of a C-to-C translator that injects bound checking, etc. comes to mind. Such translator could be used by OS distributions to provide safety in the least intrusive way and possibly completely automatically for many C codebases they have in their repositories. Translating into Go or Rust, on the other hand, cannot scale beyond some individual projects, that decide to undertake such efforts. Mainstream C compilers could implement safety features too, but realistically it cannot happen, as it's not something most people care about. So, C-to-C translator might be a best bet with the most impact.
As we've discussed, one issue is the big performance cost of these solutions. Anyone interested in working on an automatic C to SaferCPlusPlus[1] translator? It should address the performance issue[2]. And should be much more straightforward than these C to Rust/Go translators.
I thought you have an interesting solution to improving safety of C++ code. So, your techniques work with C code done in the old and new C styles w/ no work? Just fire and forget translation of C code written in arbitrary styles to to be completely memory-safe?
Yeah, the idea is that C/C++ has a finite set of "dangerous" elements. SaferCPlusPlus attempts to provide safe compatible substitutes for those elements. In C, basically the only dangerous elements are pointers and arrays (if you consider them separate things), right? SaferCPlusPlus provides safe compatible replacements for pointers (and new/malloc and delete/free). There is a "general" safe pointer type that can be used as a direct substitute for native pointers in most situations, but can sometimes have a noticeable performance cost, depending on usage. Faster safe pointers are also provided, but cannot be used in all situations.
Replacing all the pointers and arrays in your C code with the safer substitutes will eliminate the possibility of invalid memory access, in your code. Of course this doesn't prevent them from occurring in any unsafe libraries you use, including the standard library.
Also, there are certain behaviors in C that may not translate well to SaferCPlusPlus. Like exotic pointer arithmetic. Or, for example, you could imagine some C code that compares two pointers that point to items that have already been deallocated to see if they were previously pointing to the same item. Is that valid in C? Anyway, that kind of thing is not supported by the safe pointers.
There is not yet an automatic translator from C to SaferCPlusPlus, but the translation for most code is straightforward and direct. No new paradigms or "Rust borrow checker" type restrictions. You can check out the benchmark code I linked to in my comment to see examples of C++ code before and after conversion to SaferCPlusPlus. A little code reorganization sometimes helps to achieve optimal performance. But isn't that always the case? :) And of course, SaferCPlusPlus requires a modern C++ compiler and has dependencies on the standard library.
