RE: opinion, ACM Queue: Buffer Overrun Madness

["David Crocker" <dcrocker () eschertech com>]

ljknews wrote:

> >
And there are ways of using Assembly Language to avoid pitfalls that it
provides.  There are ways of using horse-drawn carriages to avoid the
major reason (think street cleaning) why the automobile was embraced in
urban areas during the early part of the 20th century.

What there are _not_ are reasons for new development to cling to languages
which make flawed constructs easy for the individual programmer to misuse.
<<

There is often one very good reason for clinging to such languages: because
there is no other suitable language available. As has already been pointed out,
there is usually very little alternative to C/C++ when it comes to kernel mode
code.

I would love to see a safer alternative to C/C++ for writing operating system
kernels, device drivers and real-time embedded applications (yes, I know Ada can
be used for the latter, buts its package structure and associated "with-ing"
problem can be a real pain in large systems). The newer programming languages
such as Java, C# and Eiffel are all designed for applications and make heavy use
of garbage collection (which is a boon to application writers, but a no-no for
kernel code and many embedded apps).

What I don't understand is why the language standardisation committees don't
remove some of the unsafe dross when they bring out new language revisions. A
classic example is the failure to define the type of a string literal in C as
"const char*". Just imagine if we had a new version of C++ with all the unsafe
stuff removed. Backwards compatibility would not be a problem in practice,
because the compiler suppliers would provide switches to make their new
compilers accept obsolete constructs.

As for non-real-time application-level code, I gave up writing them in C++ by
hand long ago. [Actually I prefer to write specifications, verify them, and let
a code generator produce correct C++ from them; but that is another story.]

David Crocker
Consultancy & contracting for dependable software development
www.eschertech.com