Re: Buffer overflow Article - CACM

[Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net>]

Jeffrey,

> Then they say that bounds checking adds 100% overhead. This may be true
> of trying to patch C, but it's certainly not true of all the checks Ada
> does, which is much more than simply bounds checking. In practice I have
> never found a case in which leaving checks in was too slow, nor where
> turning them off saved more than 10%.

Probably because Ada can remove some checks at runtime. See recent
thread on the subject. I think this really depends on your programming
style, if your applications defines lot of types with appropriate
constraints, it will help the compiler optimize away the checks.

And then even if there was 100% overhead, what the problem ? For most
applications this is not critical and at least for debugging the
application this is invaluable. Running with a 100% overhead is
equivalent to running with a computer 18 months old. Not that bad :)
Again I understand that in some domains we are counting the CPU cycles,
but this is not the majority of applications.

Pascal.

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