The Shape of Code

Tools to support array bound checking in C have been around for almost as long as the language itself.

I recently came across product disks for C-terp; at 360k per 5 1/4 inch floppy, that is a C compiler, library and interpreter shipped on 720k of storage (the 3.5 inch floppies with 720k and then 1.44M came along later; Microsoft 4/5 is the version of MS-DOS supported). This was Gimpel Software’s first product in 1984.

The Model Implementation C checker work was done in the late 1980s and validated in 1991.

Purify from Pure Software was a well-known (at the time) checking tool in the Unix world, first available in 1991. There were a few other vendors producing tools on the back of Purify’s success.

Richard Jones (no relation) added bounds checking to gcc for his PhD. This work was done in 1995.

As a fan of bounds checking (finding bugs early saves lots of time) I was always on the lookout for C checking tools. I would be interested to hear about any bounds checking tools that predated Gimpel’s C-terp; as far as I know it was the first such commercially available tool.