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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Checked C appears to be a relatively recent research project from Microsoft[0][1], so I'm not sure that FreeBSD would be terribly keen on refactoring around it. There have also been many "safer C" languages before, so the only advantage that the paper offers is that Checked C seems to have a higher degree of backwards compatibility. I suppose that would allow the implementation/refactoring to gradually occur over time, rather than requiring a herculean initial effort.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/

[1]https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc

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> the only advantage that the paper offers is that Checked C seems to have a higher degree of backwards compatibility.

In fairness, that's a big deal, especially when trying to port a large existing code base.

Yes, compatibility is at least 80% of the deal with C. The "C" in C stands for compatible.

And me thinking that C follows B in the US English alphabet.

B stands for before C

I read that it was so named because C follows B in "BCPL"

> After creating the type system, the associated syntax, and the compiler for the new language, I felt that it deserved a new name; NB seemed insufficiently distinctive. I decided to follow the single-letter style and called it C, leaving open the question whether the name represented a progression through the alphabet or through the letters in BCPL.

http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/chist.html

> The "C" in C stands for compatible.

Source?

Wiki says:

> A successor to the programming language B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix.

> In 1972, Ritchie started to improve B, which resulted in creating a new language C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_%28programming_language

It's a play on words

Regardless how much security minded people would like to replace C, the POSIX world isn't going away in generations to come, so this kind of solutions is welcomed.

The only alternative to it, besides improved static analyzers, is the ongoing work from CPU and OS vendors to bring hardware tagged memory into mainstream computing.

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