SaferCPlusPlus-AutoTranslation2 VS papers

Hi pizlonator, I'm working on a solution with similar goals (I think), but a bit of a different approach. It's a tool that auto-translates[1] (reasonable) C code to a memory-safe subset of C++. The goal is to get it reliable enough that it can be simply inserted as an (optional) build step, so that the source code can be maintained in its original form.

I'm under the impression that you're more of a low-level/compiler person, but I suggest that a higher level language like (a memory-safe subset of) C++ actually makes for a more desirable "intermediate representation" language, as it's amenable to maintaining information about the "intent" of the code, which can be helpful for optimization. It also allows programmers to provide manually optimized memory-safe implementations for performance-critical parts of the code.

The memory-safe subset of C++ is somewhat analogous to Rust's in terms of performance and in that it depends on a non-trivial static checker, but it imposes less onerous restrictions than Rust on single-threaded code.

The auto-translation tool already does the non-trivial (optimization) task of determining whether any (raw) pointer is being used as an array iterator or not. But further work to make the resulting code more performance optimal is needed. The task of optimizing a high-level "intermediate representation" language like (memory-safe) C++ is roughly analogous to optimizing lower-level IR languages, but the results should be more effective because you have more information about the original code, right?

I think this project could greatly benefit from the kind of effort you've displayed in yours.

[1]: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus-AutoTransla...

Part of the reason the proposed static analyzer has to be so ambitious is because it's trying to validate (i.e. verify as safe) as much existing/legacy code as possible. An alternative approach is to autoconvert existing code to new code that is easier to verify as safe. One advantage of this approach is that in instances where you cannot (yet) statically verify safety, you can convert to (new) elements that may resort to run-time safety mechanism when necessary. With access to the full range of safety-performance tradeoffs, this approach can (fully) safen a much larger set of legacy code then any static analyzer alone could.

There's also some support for autoconverting legacy C code that is not performance critical to use the library and conform to a safe subset of C++.

It is slowly making its way through the standards committee. https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/43

The author has a fork of clang and gcc with some pretty impressive speedups, so I’m hopeful! https://lists.isocpp.org/sg14/2024/04/1127.php

What's fun is, because everything is decided in papers, we can find out why! https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/884

Accepted paper here: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2022/p20...

> The proposed std::print function improves usability, avoids allocating a temporary std::string object and calling operator<< which performs formatted I/O on text that is already formatted. The number of function calls is reduced to one which, together with std::vformat-like type erasure, results in much smaller binary code (see § 13 Binary code).

Additionally,

> Another problem is formatting of Unicode text:

> std::cout << "Привет, κόσμος!";

> If the source and execution encoding is UTF-8 this will produce the expected output on most GNU/Linux and macOS systems. Unfortunately on Windows it is almost guaranteed to produce mojibake despite the fact that the system is fully capable of printing Unicode

See https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/557

Bringing editions to C++ failed, and I am not aware of anyone trying to tackle the issues https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/631

(I could be wrong though! I follow the committee more than you may guess, but not as much as to think I know everything about what's going on.)

GitHub would not be relevant in this respect because:

* It's owned by a (single) commercial corporation, Microsoft.

* There is censorship both by content and in some respects by country of origin.

* The code is closed.

but otherwise it's an interesting idea.

The C++ standardization committee uses GitHub to track papers submitted to them, see:

https://github.com/cplusplus/papers

There was no non-approval. The facility needs more work, and the authors (and the committee) were focusing on getting print/format done first. I hope that the paper will be worked on again in the future. We will be happy to review it once there is a revision (see github for history)

For more details on what we did at the 2023-06 Varna meeting, the [GitHub issue](https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/328) associated with the paper has a summary.