SoftBound

[Walter Bright]

bearophile wrote:
> "SoftBound: Highly Compatible and Complete Spatial Memory Safety for
> C" by  Santosh Nagarakatte, Jianzhou Zhao, Milo M K Martin and Steve
> Zdancewic: http://llvm.org/pubs/2009-06-PLDI-SoftBound.html
> 
> It's a block of about 6000 lines of C++ code that augment the LLVM
> compiler, adding extra tests. It avoids out-of-bound situations with
> pointers. It works after the compilation stage, on the LL code
> produced by LLVM, so it can be used equally for C or D. Conceptually
> looks like a simple thing. Currently can't be used yet, but I'd like
> to have a compilation flag in LDC to activate this. In in nonrelease
> mode some of the tests are already present (the bound tests of
> arrays), so it can avoid to put them in twice (in LDC you can disable
> only bound tests, and keep assertions, etc).

I don't think there's much point to this in D. You rarely need to deal 
with pointers directly. Arrays are already checked.