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Type Safety


By Larry O'Brien
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January 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
C and C++ can be made as safe as managed languages like Java and C#, with a minimal runtime overhead penalty. While no one technique can eliminate all buffer- and pointer-related security holes, there is a set of techniques, libraries and tools that can capture all such holes. Only a fraction of vulnerabilities require runtime instrumentation, making the average runtime penalty for a provably safe C or C++ program in the low single-digit percent realm. This is the claim of Plum Hall Inc. and its “Safe-Secure C/C++” project, at www.plumhall.com/sscc.html.

When I first heard the claim, I commented to a friend that if it were anyone but Tom Plum making it, I’d dismiss it as spam. Those of us who watch the software development industry regularly receive claims of breakthroughs that vastly overreach their capacity; solutions to C’s buffer vulnerabilities are as predictable as visual tools that “eliminate programming altogether.”

Tom Plum, though, is the compliance guru of the ISO C++ Standards Committee, and his company produces conformance suites that validate C, C++, Java and C# compilers’ adherence to standards. (He is also a friend and neighbor of mine and, in years past, I’ve occasionally consulted to Plum Hall.)

As SD Times columnist Andrew Binstock has ably pointed out in his recent columns, C remains the most important language in the realm of open-source software. I would go further and say that C and C++ remain the most important languages for professional programmers. Not for professional programming, necessarily, but for programmers.

Proficiency in C, coupled with (at least) a working understanding of C++ as a more type-safe version with objects, is the single most valuable technical ability for a professional programmer. This has been shown in every analysis of job postings for more than a decade, as well as being intuitively obvious to anyone who’s been on either side of a technical interview.




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