Author: Matt Taylor
Date: 02:51:41 01/22/03
Go up one level in this thread
On January 21, 2003 at 14:37:52, Dieter Buerssner wrote: >On January 21, 2003 at 12:08:08, Uri Blass wrote: > >>I finished the time of my evaluation of checking bounds. >> >>It is expensive to buy it and before deciding if to buy it I want to know about >>the value of the alternatives. >> >>How many programmers use it? > >I don't, at the moment. When I have time, I will build a gcc version with >bounds checking built in. For allocated memory, libary solutions may work very >well. For "normal" array, to me it seems, that compiler support for bounds >checking is best. Actually, I am puzzled, that compiler vendors don't do it. >Over ten years ago, I worked with Fortran under VMS. The DEC Fortran compiler >had a switch (VMS-language, if I recall correctly) /DEBUG=ALL, which included >bounds checking. With "modern" C-compilers, it seems not easily available. No >doubt, it might have very high costs at runtime. Many programmers won't care. > >Regrads. >Dieter Why does it have to be done at runtime? Ada and Pascal can do some bounds-checking at compile-time. I have heard that C# can -guarantee- that code won't mess around with bad memory. I think the same techniques can be applied toward C/C++, and I am also suprised that it is not very popular. Compile-time bounds-checking comes as free as constant folding. It may require changing the build process, but I find that less annoying than letting bugs go uncaught because I did not exercise a particular path in the program. -Matt
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.