Sailing the C of Safer Languages

Lea Wittie
Dartmouth College

Most operating systems are written in C for its flexibility and low
level data control. Unlike ML or Java, C is not a safe language and
together, malicious hackers and forgetful OS programmers can
compromise the safety of an operating system. Hackers take advantage
of system vulnerabilities using attacks such as buffer overflows. OS
programmers deal with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and the
possibility of lock mis-use and other safety glitches is high.

Several research groups are working on C-like safer languages where
the aforementioned errors cannot occur.  These languages depend on
advanced type systems to implement safety checks for the programmer. These
checks are mostly done at compile time with little or no run time hit. My
work with Clay, one of the safer languages, in part extends the language to
include lock safety guarantees.