This seems interesting to me. I liked the way CCured did inference to document how you used and abused your pointers, but what it did with that information was maybe not ideal.
Enable extension
Add `checked` to array declarations. (for the simplest
case they've implemented).
I'm not sold on this project as we haven't seen any results of course, but the approach is simpler than switching to C++.
The problem here is compiler support and performance.
And of course, but those will come in time. The point of it is that C++ isn't any safer (And actually, I would say is more risky in some aspects, because of the differences between (For example) the UB in C and C++), while Checked C is guaranteed to be safer, to a certain degree.
Quoting from the paper (https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc/releases/download/v0.5...):
Reasoning about the correctness of programs with declared bounds sometimes requires reasoning about simple aspects of program behavior. To support this, lightweight invariants are added to Checked C. A lightweight invariant declares a relation between a variable and a simple expression using a relational operator. An example would be the statement x < y + 5. Lightweight invariants can be declared at variable declarations, at assignment statements, for parameters, and for return values. Checked C is extended with rules for checking these lightweight invariants. Just as type checking rules are defined by the programming language, so are rules for checking lightweight invariants. The checking of the correctness of programmer-declared bounds is integrated with the checking of invariants.
The fact than you can fork is nice, but if the project is too reliant on the paid staff and doesn't have enough community surrounding it to survive getting dropped by its benefactor, you better hope you have the resources to maintain it yourself. This can happen even with no ill-intention involved, but the whole RoboVM debacle has convinced me that Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is not quite dead at Microsoft.
The RoboVM situation, while unfortunate is a lesson for people not to rely on proprietary tooling for portable projects.
While I mostly code on JVM and .NET languages during the day, I use C++ for my hobby projects on mobile OSes.
The reason being that C++ is an open standard and officially supported in all SDKs, no need for third party layers like RoboVM.
A few similar lessons with my time spent on programming languages that weren't first party on platform SDKs, made me always choose first party languages, if I have decision power in the selection process.
Yeah, that's why I said "Microsoft or anyone else". The only other time I mentioned Microsoft was in reference to RoboVM, which doesn't have much to do with Google or Facebook.
> The RoboVM situation, while unfortunate is a lesson for people not to rely on proprietary tooling for portable projects.
I agree, but the fact that RoboVM started off open source with a GPL licensed compiler was one of the main reasons I chose it. It's my own fault I didn't look to see how contributions were structured, or notice that very little code came from outside RoboVM, sure. That's why I'm advising caution in similar situations.
We're talking about Mozilla.
Netscape was a different company -- and besides we're discussing under the context of MS vs benevolent/FOSS entities.
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Last month ff was ahead
Source: http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13007/umfrage/... (German statistics office. Paywalled sadly, but you can see the first paragraph that describes Firefox market share at 52%.)
Microsoft became the darling of the community, OR, in addition to embracing open source, they embraced voting ring tactics. These are two explanations I have, maybe there is another. Maybe my criticism really was obnoxious...
And the thing about open source projects, is just that. They're open source. If the wider community takes hold of them, there's not much Microsoft can do. Because then you just see a fork.
You don't have to be a fan of Microsoft to simply appreciate the contribution to open software, as it is.
And 'forced' is a stretch anyways, how to block it is well documented, and was months in advance. And you can revert, something Google and others will not let you do.
I also deleted all the Google apps I could find on my Android phone, and I avoid storing any of my personal data on it, because Google seems to believe it's their machine, not mine. I'd use some other mobile OS if I had any choice in the matter.
- Paid OS != Free OS.
- OS update != software update.
I paid for my phone. I paid for my Windows license. I paid a lot more for my phone, which Android is trying to forcibly update without my consent to a version which will cripple my phone's functionality substantially.
"Power to the people" has always been the whole point of personal computing, as far as I'm concerned. Give people control over their data, their processes, their lives; that's why we're doing this, isn't it?
That's why I'm doing it, at least.
I think the writing is on the wall. Computing devices will split into two diverging branches: one tailored for limited configuration and aimed at media consumption and use by non-tech users, the other providing (hopefully) full freedom to modify, aimed at IT co. and interested hobbyists. It will be quite some achievement if mechanisms to increase vendor control aren't increasingly integrated even into the devices in the second segment, as things like Intel ME/UEFI Secure Boot show.
Now why does anything in your post matter?
I respect your right to have a different opinion. I don't have to respect the opinion itself. Hope you can see the difference.
The only thing I'm talking about is honesty - MS is trying to show they love open-source just because they are so awesome and hackers, but in reality it's just profitable mask and they are glad to wear it.
So, yes, we can edit those TeX documents they put on GitHub to our heart's delight.
https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc-llvm
Doesn't that look like an open source implementation? Or did I misunderstand something?
However:
> The compiler is not far enough along for programmers to "kick the tires" on Checked C. We do not have a installable version clang available yet. If you are really interested, you can build your own copy of the compiler:
Or maybe we stopped categorically demonizing some technology because of its provenience and started evaluating it based on criteria like usefulness and applicability.
You know, like if we actually take the "engineer" part of "software engineer" seriously instead of using it for everyone who once wrote a PHP page for his uncle.
The argument is exactly to make this difference. There is the technical and somewhat objective aspect of the language and its implementation, and there are the people who created the language, who use the language etc. A bad language can have a great community, and vise versa.
The general idea is straightforward: "The unchecked C pointer type * is kept and three new checked pointer types are added: one for pointers that are never used in pointer arithmetic and do not need bounds checking (ptr), one for array pointer types that are involved in pointer arithmetic and need bounds checking (array ptr), and one for pointer types that carry their bounds with them dynamically (span)." So this is really a new language derived from C, to which programs can be converted.
This is basically a good idea, but it's only useful if pushed hard by somebody like Microsoft. People won't convert without heavy pressure.
[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/p477-necula.pdf