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by ajtulloch 4892 days ago
You could, but that comes at a cost. That's why libraries like the STL in C++ provide std::vector::operator[] and std::vector::at() - so the user can freely choose whether to pay the extra cost for the bounds check, or not. That's why C provides both malloc() and calloc() - so the user can freely choose whether memory is zero-initialized, or not.

One of the major design decisions for C/C++ is that you don't pay for what you don't use. This is what makes them so flexible and performant across a wide range of systems and applications, but also leaves these safety choices up to the user. Some languages make that tradeoff, but it's not always the right decision.
1 comments
pjmlp 4892 days ago
On the other hand there are languages where correctness comes before speed, and they still provide you the mechanisms to get speed if you really want.

For example, in the Pascal family of languages, you can always disable bounds checking or do pointer arithmetic if you really want to, but that should only be done if there is really the need to do so.

A problem with many C and C++ developers is that they suffer from premature optimization, thinking that we are still targeting PDP-11 like environments.

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