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Cornell did that. They saw horrible things. Then, they fixed the root cause:

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/

Did something similar with C in Popcorn: a safe, C dialect that compiles to TALC. Gotta wonder what things would be like if more groups took such an approach to the problems they've found in C, UNIX, etc. Well, it was a nice vision at least. :)

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I followed the web search links to Cyclone, Popcorn's successor and ended up at http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~greg/cyclone/ which is a 404.

Which suggests how popular these safe C's are, regrettably.

Yep. How it always goes. Fortunately, Cyclones region and dynamic safety helped inspire Rust's scheme. It went somewhere even if not for C programmers in general. Far as also-rans, there's Microsoft's Vault, FLINT's C0 used in Verisoft for whole-system verification, and Clay that's mainly applied by Lea Wittie in stuff like device drivers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080219014100/http://research.m...

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.468...

http://www.verisoft.de/VerisoftRepository.html

http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~lwittie/research/Clay.pdf

http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~lwittie/research.html

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