[jacquesm]

My experience as a programmer of some 40 years in C has yet to expose me to a C compiler that has length based rather than nul terminated strings as the base string type. Please point me to one in somewhat widespread use rather than an experimental implementation that uses this concept and make sure not to confuse libraries with the implementation of the language.

[GoblinSlayer]

Since no C/C++ compiler supports it, for them implementation is in a library.

[jacquesm]

So that means they are not part of C/C++. Which was the point. You can write software in C/C++ but that's hardly news and you can use that to create new data types that are not in the language, which also is hardly news.

[GoblinSlayer]

People suggesting it are concerned about security, they don't intend it to be a novel invention. Bound checking predates C.

[jacquesm]

Yes it does. But that doesn't mean that you get to state a lot of stuff with certainty that upon inspection turns out to simply not be true. C programmers are - in spite of what you appear to think - also concerned about security. And whether bounds checking predates C or not has nothing to do with how this is implemented, in a library or in the compiler itself (or even in the hardware).

If you reference C you are talking about the compiler, that, and only that is the language implementation. In C that specification is so tiny that a lot of the functionality that you might expect to be present in the language is actually library stuff. K&R does a poor job for novices to split out what is the language proper and what is the library, but a good hint is that anything that requires an include file isn't part of the language itself.

The original comment to which you responded talked about the ABI, the layer between the applications and the operating system, presumably the UNIX/POSIX ABI, which is more or less cast in concrete by now and unlikely to be replaced because if you do so you introduce a breaking change: all compiled applications using that ABI will no longer work. Some versions of UNIX will occasionally do this and this is widely regarded as a great way to limit your adoption. So the problem, in a nutshell is: how do we repair the security situation that has emerged as the result of many years of bad practices in such a way that our systems continue to work without having to re-invest the untold trillions of $ that have been spent on software that we use every day. This is a hard problem. TFA is a small, and incremental step in trying to solve that problem.

Others are more pessimistic, believe that we should just take our lumps and get on with that rewrite, usually in whatever is their favorite managed (or unmanaged, in some cases) language. Yet others pursue compiler based or hardware based solutions which all introduce different degrees of incompatibility.

I'm somewhat bearish on seeing this problem resolved in my lifetime. At the same time I applaud every little step in the right direction. And I personally do not believe that replacing C's 'string type' (which it really doesn't have other than nul terminated string literals) is the way to go due to the reasons outlined above. But an incremental approach allows for fixing some known issues and allows us to back away from historical mistakes in a way that we can afford the cost and to do so without incurring the penalty of a complete rewrite (which usually comes with a whole raft of new bugs as well). So small improvements that do not address each and every grievance should be welcomed. Even if they no doubt introduce new problems at least the scope is such that you can - hopefully - deal with those without introducing new security issues.

[GoblinSlayer]

Putty and s2n are examples how this problem is solved, they work on POSIX, e.g. linux, just compile them with gcc and they work.