[matis140]

I wonder about analysis tools for c/c++. I know those tools have come a long way. Is the problem the decades of time where those tools were proprietary or expensive or free/open and poor in quality where most of this code was written? Or do these tools actually fall short of their claims of memory safety and the only solution is a rewrite? Or I guess it can be like opening an old solution in visual studio seeing it has 100+ warnings or doesn't even build anymore with current tooling so changes go on the back burner because that small change turns into a few days of work because nobody has built it in the last 10 year's...

[steveklabnik]

If the tools were able to get you the equivalent of Rust's safety, we wouldn't have bothered making Rust.

These tools are great, and I welcome anything that makes software more safe. But you can't truly retrofit safety onto C or C++. You can improve it, but it's an improvement, not a solution.

[bluGill]

The tools have come a long ways. However they are not very powerful. C++ the language has come much father in the ability to write memory safe code - but this doesn't do much for the old legacy code out there.