Fixing C's Biggest Mistake

[areYouSureAboutThat]

On Thursday, 29 December 2022 at 20:38:23 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
>
> ..... The *actual* billion dollar mistake(s) in C are:
>
> 1. uninitialized data leading to undefined behavior
>
> 2. no way to do array buffer overflow detection
>
> because those lead to malware and other silent disasters.
>
> And it's good to have a state that a memory object can be 
> initialized too that cannot fail.

I would argue, the billion dollar mistakes are really the fault 
of the users of the C programming language, and not the language 
itself.

Those sames users can make billion dollar mistakes in any 
language. Perhaps, not those particular ones you mentioned, but 
others. Even in the most safest language possible, a programmer 
could leave an API exposed, that wasn't meant to be exposed...

The programmer can actually do runtime bounds checking in C. e.g. 
Create your own vector type with bounds checking.

The programmer can also initialise everything to a known state in 
C. One could also use calloc instead of malloc, or create a their 
own memory allocator.

The C standard library didn't help either. It too could have been 
designed in a more memory safe manner. But like C itself, it is 
minimal, perfomance oriented, and not designed to get in your way 
and make things difficult for you.

Even if C did all these things for you, and more, it's likely C 
programmers would have found a way to remove them, turn them off, 
created their own vector that doesn't do bound checking, create 
their own memory allocater that doesn't initiaslise its 
allocations ...

e.g  -release -noboundscheck  .. sound familiar?