C was already a bad option in the mid-90's compared with the alternatives, it is due to the unfortunate adoption of GNU manifesto and POSIX systems that we got where we are.
I was under the impression FORTIFY only checked bounds with specific functions (mostly those starting with "mem" or "str"), and not on general pointer arithmetic. Thus, an OOB array access would not be caught. Am I wrong on this? Online sources seem to agree with my understanding: https://zatoichi-engineer.github.io/2017/10/06/fortify-sourc...
Additionally, FORTIFY does not work on variable length arrays (like std::vector), only those which have a size known at compile time.
> Hence why the ultimate solution is to have hardware memory tagging for bounds checking, Solaris has been doing it for a decade, ARM is following along, including a collaboration with CHERI, only Intel borked their MPX design, and it seems not to be on RISC-V's radar.
Unfortunately, Intel and ARM are the only relevant vendors here (at least in 2022, but for the record I wish the others the best of luck), so Intel's implementation sucking is a huge blow.
You use it alongside other compiler flags to enable them like _GLIBCXX_DEBUG, and FORTIFY levels.
It is not perfect, but since there are domains that won't stop using C and C++ past our lifetimes, that is better than nothing.
If this is true, for new projects, such as the experimental OS we're all talking about, Rust (or any language with a similar feature) could be a better choice.
C also doesn't have .at(). Considering C and C++ are the most obvious and direct competitors to Rust, bounds checking would be a significant upgrade if Rust paradigms cause it to be used more often.