Whenever I see another round of the C++ community’s war against guaranteed memory safety, I think of Tony Hoare’s Turing Award lecture where he said that if computer engineering were real engineering, memory safety bugs would be considered criminal negligence.
He did not mean this as hyperbole. If you ship software and it fails in the real world due to a memory safety bug, they should find out who put their engineer stamp on the software and prosecute them criminally.
He said that after having written an implementation of Algol 60, in 1963, which did run-time bounds checking. On 1963 hardware. His customers didn’t even want to have the *option* to switch it off when they were offered it.
In C++ 60 years later they’re still surprised that the cost of run-time bounds checking is affordable.
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