"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
While Intel's MPX extensions were a failure, Solaris makes use of ADI on SPARC, iOS uses PAC, Google is researching adopting ARM MTE into Android, ARM sponsors CHERI with Morello project, Azure Sphere has Plutonium, and so forth.
However these are all pontual efforts, and their large scale effects will take years or decades to start making a difference.
Agreed. That is why C and C++ should be replaced with more reliable alternatives.
40 years ago, the case could be made. But C and C++ are not new languages, and the fact that just barely shy of no one can demonstrate the existence of secure C or C++ code bases without staggering levels of effort put into that process is data now, not just anecdote.
(And let me emphasize the effort as my yardstick. Writing truly secure code is arguably something nobody has ever done at scale in any language... but C and C++ are certainly unique in the sheer level of effort it takes poured in to them to even match what a number of other languages come with out of the box, let alone exceed them. If you aren't using some very high quality and fairly expensive tools like Coverity on a routine basis, you aren't even close.)