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Nothing in the standard prevents a C compiler + tightly coupled malloc implementation from implementing bounds checks. Out-of-bounds operations result in undefined behavior, and crashing the program is a valid response to undefined behavior. If your malloc implementation cooperates, you can even bounds-check pointer arithmetic without violating calling conventions. It's quite a shame that there isn't a compiler that…
Unrestricted pointer arithmetic is indeed incompatible with memory safety. You set a pointer to point to one structure, then you change it and it now points to another structure or array. The compiler doesn't know the semantics of your code, so how can it tell if you meant to do that? And malloc/memcpy is way too low to check this stuff. It only sees memory addresses; it has no idea what variables are in them. Tightl…
Re: The Heartbleed Bug
#341You can do it, although at a considerable performance hit. The usual approach is "fat" pointers that include bounds information. Memory safe pointer arithmetic is achieved by checking that any constructed pointer lies within those bounds, and dying noisily if it does not (alternatively, you can test on dereference).