7 ms·

Any C programmers who have never failed to check their bounds? Anyone? Anyone? Because everyone has done it. Now would be a nice time for one of the Lint ven

• bunderbunder 13y ago
  Or better yet, start seriously talking about moving to a language that doesn't make it so stupendously easy for trivial bugs like these to get so far out of hand. Bounds checking incurs such a trivial amount of overhead, and the potential cost of straying out of bounds is so high. I understand we've got decades' worth of C culture built up around coding idioms that are incompatible with type safety and bounds checking. I understand that means that developing and migrating to a dialect of C or C++ that offers something in the way of a safety net is anything but trivial. But we've also got decades' worth of painful examples of just how catastrophic - and difficult to prevent - these kinds of errors can be, and that alone should justify the cost. At the very least, consider the example set by C#: Be type safe and do bounds checks by default, but provide an `unsafe` keyword for those cases where it really is necessary to disable them.