Danger: unsafe languages🔗

1 Aug 2010

For 25 years, I have been trying to teach my students about the dangers of unsafe programming languages. I have been trying to warn developers and managers of the dangers of C and C++. I may have affected the occasional listener but I am sure most went back to work and used C/C++ and soon forgot about my warnings. We PL people are just too abstract.

John Regehr, a professor at Utah and a researcher on embedded systems, has finally written a series of columns on this topic that may just do the job. They do it for me. So I think they deserve to be widely known:

• A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++, Part 1

• A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++, Part 2

• A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++, Part 3

If just a few people get to see it from here, good.