I certainly hope that's where we're headed. The more we can tell the compiler about our code, the better.
It might also be interesting to provide hints like "this int should only ever be in the range 1-30" :)
That's in all the Pascal-family languages - Pascal, Modula, Ada.
"Perhaps the future of software isn't "rewrite everything in Rust", but instead we end up annotating existing C/C++ with borrow checking information."
Trying to retrofit this to C++ runs into the problem that too often you're lying to the language to get something done. Like extracting a raw pointer to be sent to a system call. You have to break a lot of existing code to make this work. Which means a new safer C++ like language. There are about five of those to choose from, none of which are used much.
Rust was right to do a clean break. But then they just got too weird, with their own brand of functional programming and their own brand of a type system.
Rust has some brilliant ideas, but it's too hard. Go is rather dumb, but good for getting server-side applications running.
This is where languages like Haskell, Rust and others fail: the programming language nerds take over and design a language for themselves, making it weirder and weirder as time passes and new arcane features are added.
you mean like the gigabytes of rust code just put in unsafe {} blocks or doing panic! when they don't know what to do with the error ? :p
Microsoft's C/C++ annotations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/u...
Ada's ranges: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/range
Fun stuff to learn about in theory, but, unless you're working at a place where formal verification is part of the culture, good luck selling these tools to upper management.
More resources discussed here: http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/9/19/how-do-you-explain...
Pedantically you are correct: checking contracts is expected to be too expensive to actually do as part of a build. C++ expects that static analysis will check contracts as well (static analysis is might take 10 hours to check what compiles in 10 minutes)
template<int N>
class T;
constexpr int N = f();
T<N> var;