Bounds Checking

[Sebastien Loisel]

Hello.

I noticed a one month old thread about bounds checking for gcc. This would be 
very useful to many of us. The thread mostly discussed fat pointers and some 
other hacks which were less clear to me. I would like to point out that Richard 
Jones and Paul Kelly a long time ago (1995) released patches for gcc 2.7.0 (and 
then to 2.7.1 and 2.7.2) for fine grained bounds checking. According to the web 
page, the method they use preserves binary compatibility and does not result in 
ridiculous slowdowns.

If anyone is going to implement this (and I certainly hope it will happen), it 
seems that Richard and Paul's work should be checked out. However, I have never 
tried it myself so I can't really answer any questions.

http://www-ala.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/BoundsChecking.html

Sebastien Loisel -- McGill University -- Sun Microsystems
http://www.math.mcgill.ca/~loisel/