checkedc VS compiler-team

https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc

Also, one can combine subsets of C with FOSS, static analyzers that can handle those subsets. Then, compose only in ways that the tools can handle. Then, combinatorial and fuzz testing of the interface composition.

I know you’re doing the project for fun while exploring specific ways to achieve your goals. So, these are just some links and concepts that might help on your journey. Lots of folks don’t know about prior work in this area. So, I keep passing it on.

- [Checked C](https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc) - extensions to make C safer #cpp

Yes. Microsoft Research is working on "Checked C": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/

As a test, someone ported FreeBSD's networking stack to Checked C. It was easy and there was no overhead to performance and binary size.

Haha. I think they did ultimately agree. Thus a later research project is: Checked-C

> Also, why aren't we size-sorting fields already?

We are for struct/enum fields. https://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reo...

There's even an unstable flag to help catch incorrect assumptions about struct layout. https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/457

Are you talking about https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/688 ? I think that issue provides a lot of interesting context for this specific improvement.

And mips64, which rustc recently dumped support for after their attempt to extort funding/resources from Loongson failed:

https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/648

This is the biggest problem with the LLVM mentality: they use architecture support as a means to extract support (i.e. salaried dev positions) from hardware companies.

GNU may have annoyingly-higher standards for merging changes, but once it's in there and supported they will keep it for the long haul.

See https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/688

The work has been going on for some time now and it seems we are quite close to it being enabled as a default for nightly builds, I am super thrilled upwards of 20% faster clean builds and possibly more are on the horizon. Hope everything works out without triggering some unseen ICE. https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/681 Edit: If you want to discuss this feature reach out on Zulip

I'd recommend reading the MCP[1] they linked regarding the decision as well as their target tier policy [2].

They are dropping tier 1 support for Win 7 and Win 8. That means they are no longer going to guarantee that the project builds on those platforms and passes all tests via CI.

As long as it is feasible they will probably keep CI runs for those platforms and if interested parties step up and provide sufficient maintenance support, it will remain tier 2. i.e a guarantee that it builds on those platforms via CI but not necessarily that all features are supported and guaranteed via passing tests.

If interested parties can provide sufficient maintenance that all tests continue passing, it will be tier 1 in all but name. However the rest of the development community won't waste their time with issues like Win 7 and 8's partial support for UTF-8.

And once CI stops being feasible for the compiler team to host, it'll drop down to tier 3. If there's sufficient interest from the community towards maintaining these targets, in practice you should see comparable support to with tiers 1 or 2 however now any CI will be managed externally by the community and the compiler team will stop worrying about changes that could break compilation on those targets.

TLDR: They aren't saying "it'll no longer work" but rather "if you want it to stay maintained for these targets, you have to pitch in dev hours to maintain it and eventually support the infrastructure to do this because we don't see a reason to continue doing this". So if you care for these targets, you'll have to contribute to keep it maintained.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/651

(The already broken) XP support was removed almost 3 years ago: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/378