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From: "Harald Korneliussen" <vintermann@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?
Date: 25 Jan 2007 23:16:10 -0800
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On 25 Jan, 23:36, "Jeffrey R. Carter" <jrcar...@acm.org> wrote:
> The only safe use of C is as a target language for code generators (such
> as the SofCheck Ada -> C compiler). The continuing creation of
> buffer-overflow errors in C shows that, in practice, it is impossible
> for humans to create safe C.
>
Not to promote C myself, but there exist tools which may be useful.
Run-time checking such as can be achieved with profilers and
malloc-replacements don't cut it, IMO, since they only find errors in
the most trodden paths of the program. Static analysers, like the one
promoted by Coverity, now there's something valuable. Aslo,
annotation-based analyzers like splint can probably make programs as
safe as Ada if the developers actually take the time to use them.
Another interesting approach is that taken by CCured, of transforming C
programs by classifying pointers according to usage, and then inserting
run-time checks to guarantee no access violations of memory corruption.
These are interesting, practical approaches for those of us who have to
maintain C code. The downside is that the further your program strays
from ansi C (not to say into C++!), the less tools are available.