Esthetics (or worse?) of Secure Pointers

[Per Abrahamsen]

Excuse me for side-tracking for a moment.

It is clear that John Gilmore's main interest in BP is security
concerns, and given that he fund the project that use obviously has
priority.

However, I suspect most GCC users interest in BP will be as a debug
tool.  As such, some parameters change: It doesn't matter whether GC
ever get used in production systems.  It will be nice, just like many
developers leave assertions enabled in shipped code, but is not
essential.  Fast is nice, but again not essential.  A 200% overhead
doesn't reduce the utility much.  A guarentee that all bounds in the
system is checked is no requirement, this will be an extra tool, not a
replacement of whatever else is used to eliminate errors.  On the
other hand, having to recompile all external libraries, and switching
between the two versions, will be a major obstacle.

So while "securing free software" have to be the main goal because of
funding, I hope you won't totally forget "a new debug tool" as a
secondary goal.  It will not be worthless even if it doesn't get
mainstream.