Shouldn't invalid references like this fail at compile time?

[Mike Franklin]

On Wednesday, 24 January 2018 at 01:44:51 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:

> Microcontroller code tends to be small and so it's unlikely 
> that you'll need to worry about it.

I think you need to get involved in programming microcontrollers 
again because the landscape has changed drastically.  The 
microcontrollers I use now are more powerful than PCs of the 90's.

The project I'm currently working on is an HMI for industrial 
control with a full touchscreen 2D GUI.  The code base  is 
240,084 lines of code and that doesn't even include the 3rd party 
libraries I'm using (e.g. 2D graphics library, newlib C library, 
FreeType font rendering library).  That's not "small" by my 
standard of measure.

And with devices such as this being increasingly connected to the 
Internet, such carelessness can easily be exploited as evident in 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Dyn_cyberattack   And that's 
not to mention the types of critical systems that run on such 
platforms that we are increasingly becoming more dependent on.

We better start worrying about it.

Mike