Pro.lifetime

Pro.lifetime: Lifetime safety profile

Accessing through a pointer that doesn't point to anything is a major source of errors, and very hard to avoid in many traditional C or C++ styles of programming. For example, a pointer might be uninitialized, the nullptr, point beyond the range of an array, or to a deleted object.

See the current design specification here.

Lifetime safety profile summary:

• Lifetime.1: Don't dereference a possibly invalid pointer: detect or avoid.

Impact

Once completely enforced through a combination of style rules, static analysis, and library support, this profile

• eliminates one of the major sources of nasty errors in C++
• eliminates a major source of potential security violations
• improves performance by eliminating redundant "paranoia" checks
• increases confidence in correctness of code
• avoids undefined behavior by enforcing a key C++ language rule