Type safety could prevent nuclear war

[tsbockman via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 4 February 2016 at 23:53:58 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 February 2016 at 23:35:46 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
>> Just because *sometimes* the source code of the other module 
>> must be compiled independently, is a poor excuse to skip 
>> obvious, useful safety checks *all* the time.
>
> The context is a compilation system for building big software 
> on very slow CPUs with kilobytes of RAM.
>
> C was designed for always compiling independently and compiling 
> source files that are bigger than what can be held in RAM, and 
> also for building executables that can fill most of system RAM. 
> So the compilation system was designed for using external 
> memory (disk) and that affects C a lot. The forerunner for C, 
> BCPL was a bootstrap language for writing compilers. So C is 
> minimal by design.

OK. That's a good reason for C's original design.

But it's 2016 and my PC has 32GiB of RAM. Why should a C compiler 
running on such a system skip safety checks just because they 
would be too expensive to run on some *other* computer?

This isn't even a particularly expensive (in compile-time costs) 
check to perform anyway; all that is necessary is to store a 
temporary table of symbol signatures somewhere (it doesn't need 
to be in RAM), and check that any duplicate entries are 
consistent with each other before linking.

This is already a solved problem in most other programming 
languages; there is no fundamental reason that the solutions used 
in D, C++, or Java could not be applied to C - without even 
changing any of the language semantics.