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by musicale 482 days ago
The path forward I see is improved safety features for popular C compilers and toolchains.

Ultimately it may be necessary to convince standards committees, but it seems like adding features and flags into mainline clang/llvm (and/or gcc, visual studio, ...) paves the road toward improved memory safety for C at large.

For example, if clang supported it out of the box, I could imagine OpenBSD (or macOS or other OSes that use clang) eventually compiling all (or nearly all) of its C code, including kernel, library, and userland code, in safe mode - and maybe even making it the default. In fact we already see certain safety flags and compiler/runtime features being adopted.