> Whether it’s theoretically possible to write static analyzers that implement Rust-like guarantees in C-like languages seems a bit irrelevant to me, since in the real world, none actually exist. Rust does.
Both of those are much newer than Rust. So it appears Rust was valuable after all, even if all it did was influence C++ static analysis developers!
I will also point out that these are still much less than what Rust offers — read through the list of caveats in the MSVC post. Or the fact that “analysis is only function-local” in Clang...
Oh, and for these to catch everything you would need to only depend, transitively, on things that also used them. Just like in Rust you need to only depend transitively on things that don’t abuse `unsafe`, but that seems less unreasonable to me.
> Or the fact that “analysis is only function-local” in Clang...
This is not inherently a problem; Rust's analysis is also function-local, it's actually a design goal.
That said, you're 100% right at the issues here; this does not guarantee memory safety, it is far less than what Rust provides. That said, I'm happy it exists; anything that makes stuff better is a win.
actually, MSVC has a lifetime tracker for a year now : https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/lifetime-profile-upda...
and clang's is progressing nicely : https://llvm.org/devmtg/2019-04/slides/TechTalk-Horvath-Impl...