Google's take on memory safety

[Carl Sturtivant]

On Saturday, 9 March 2024 at 02:33:16 UTC, Gregor Mückl wrote:
> This isn't going to happen in this century.
>
> You're talking about an absolutely *gigantic* amount of 
> software - an utterly, unfathomably, big amount. Many thousand 
> lifetimes' worth of work.
>
> It would be a major miracle if even a single one of these 
> chunks of software would get replaced by a rewrite from scratch 
> within the next one or two decades.

There's a hidden assumption that this task has to be accomplished 
the way that software was originally written, and not largely 
automated.

ImportC is an illustration of a strong beginning of such, so that 
C can gradually be D'ified and, en route, made safer. Moving C to 
D largely automatically is looking like a real prospect now, 
making the impossible complete rewrite into something quite 
different.

If D reaches a place where human assisted automatic translation 
of C source to D source is mostly just automatic, then it becomes 
a strong contender to solve a significant fraction of the problem 
by an unexpected route. As I see it, ImportC is a hint about the 
future.