Cyclone (programming language)

The Cyclone programming language is intended to be a safe dialect of the C language. Cyclone is designed to avoid buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities that are possible in C programs, without losing the power and convenience of C as a tool for system programming. Cyclone development was started as a joint project of AT&T Labs Research and Greg Morrisett's group at Cornell University in 2001. Version 1.0 was released on May 8, 2006. Cyclone attempts to avoid some of the common pitfalls of C, while still maintaining its look and performance. To this end, Cyclone places the following limits on programs: NULL checks are inserted to prevent segmentation faults Pointer arithmetic is limited Pointers must be initialized before use (this is enforced by definite assignment analysis) Dangling pointers are prevented through region analysis and limits on free() Only "safe" casts and unions are allowed goto into scopes is disallowed switch labels in different scopes are disallowed Pointer-returning functions must execute return setjmp and longjmp are not supported To maintain the tool set that C programmers are used to, Cyclone provides the following extensions: Never-NULL pointers do not require NULL checks "Fat" pointers support pointer arithmetic with run-time bounds checking Growable regions support a form of safe manual memory management Garbage collection for heap-allocated values Tagged unions support type-varying arguments Injections help automate the use of tagged unions for programmers Polymorphism replaces some uses of void * varargs are implemented as fat pointers Exceptions replace some uses of setjmp and longjmp For a better high-level introduction to Cyclone, the reasoning behind Cyclone and the source of these lists, see this paper. Cyclone looks, in general, much like C, but it should be viewed as a C-like language. Cyclone implements three kinds of pointer: (the normal type) @ (the never-NULL pointer), and ? (the only type with pointer arithmetic allowed, "fat" pointers).

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