Re:Rust is not a good C replacement
by Manishearth on Monday March 25, 2019 @04:34PM
(#19486516)
As someone who has dabbled in the C++ program analysis space before: A _ton_ of effort has gone into this already. There's also a lot of promising stuff there already.
There's active research on how to best do aliasing/pointer analyses, both for optimizers and for linters.
I've often said that the holy grail of C++ program analysis is aliasing info that is perfect, local, and can be computed in a reasonable time. The current situation on this is basically "pick one", _sometimes_ "pick two" if you're good. Rust's design gets you all three by picking different defaults and asking for some extra annotations from the user. The kicker is: it's all based on existing research!
Firefox has its own static analysis and IIRC has looked into other static analysis stuff (the GC analyses are pretty awesome). C++ static analysis is good, but not good enough, in this case at least.
There's active research on how to best do aliasing/pointer analyses, both for optimizers and for linters.
I've often said that the holy grail of C++ program analysis is aliasing info that is perfect, local, and can be computed in a reasonable time. The current situation on this is basically "pick one", _sometimes_ "pick two" if you're good. Rust's design gets you all three by picking different defaults and asking for some extra annotations from the user. The kicker is: it's all based on existing research!
Firefox has its own static analysis and IIRC has looked into other static analysis stuff (the GC analyses are pretty awesome). C++ static analysis is good, but not good enough, in this case at least.