Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack)

Posted Nov 11, 2023 8:13 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack) by smurf
Parent article: Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack)

It's pretty extensive, man. Unless you want to move the goalposts to the point where Java isn't "safe", it's safe.

> In this mode, by design, it is not allowed to call native code and access native memory. All memory is managed by the garbage collector, and all code that should be run needs to be compiled to bitcode.

> Pointer arithmetic is only possible to the extent allowed by the C standard. In particular, overflows are prevented, and it is not possible to access different allocations via out-of-bounds access. All such invalid accesses result in runtime exceptions rather than in undefined behavior.

> In managed mode, GraalVM simulates a virtual Linux/AMD64 operating system, with musl libc and libc++ as the C/C++ standard libraries. All code needs to be compiled for that system, and can then be used to run on any architecture or operating system supported by GraalVM. Syscalls are virtualized and routed through appropriate GraalVM APIs.

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/llvm/Nati...

I think this is a very cool project and would love to play with it sometime. Doing something like hooking this into the Gentoo build system and making a whole Linux distro where everything is compiled to have these safety characteristics would be interesting. Of course, it would be as slow as Java, so I wouldn't actually want to use such a system normally. But maybe I'd be willing to pay the cost with a web browser, or for server software exposed to the Internet.