Checked C – A Safer C/C++ from Microsoft

I met with David Tarditi, leader of the Checked C project, last week at PLDI. He previously worked on System C#, Midori and Singularity where he was in the group that developed lightweight C# runtime and AOT compiler for Midori. Checked C seems like a continuation of this series of work from Microsoft Research with an opposite approach to safe systems programming (opposite as in trying to make C safer rather than trying to make a safe language faster).

Also, if you check the spec you can find the design choices they rejected too (with evaluation of the choices). It looks like a well thought project rather than just saying "let's add some bounds checks to C".

I'm not entirely sure I see the value proposition for C++ here. We already have e.g. std::array and std::vector, and AFAICT the other bits of this could be implemented as templates?

(Granted, std::array and std::vector don't require bounds checking unless you use at(), but there's nothing that says you couldn't implement two other template classes exactly like them which mandate bounds checking. std::array and std::vector usually do bounds checking in debug mode, but I'll grant that debug mode may be too slow.)

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11899925 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11900009