SAsafercplusplus·Jan 24, 2020
I think the answer is yes. There's a complementary project [1] that aims to enforce a slightly more restricted memory safe subset of C++ than the lifetime profile checker does (or eventually will). The restrictions do not manifest as limitations on the code, but rather as extra run-time checks in some scenarios.
The C++ language maps one-to-one to the safe subset, so auto-conversion of (reasonable) existing C++ code to the safe subset should be a straightforward (if tedious) undertaking. The issue will be the performance of the converted code, which will depend on how pointers/references are used in the original code.
Pointers that are expected to never point to (in addition to never dereference to) a destroyed object can be converted to "safe" pointers with little run-time overhead [2]. Otherwise the pointer would need to converted to on
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e with more overhead [3]. Pointers that can be verified (by the static analyzer) to conform to "scope lifetime" rules (akin to Rust) can remain zero-overhead pointers.
New code written in the safe subset would generally have performance in the ballpark of traditional C++ [4].
[1] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpptool
[2] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus#norad-point...
[3] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus#registered-...
[4] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus-BenchmarksG... (note that the benchmark code is quite old and will be updated soon)