Safety

The lifetime safety profile in the C++ core guidelines boils down to one issue: don't dereference a possible invalid pointer. A pointer may be invalid because it is not initialised or the nullptr. A pointer may also point beyond its rage or to a deleted object.

Today's post is about the second profile of the C++ Core Guidelines: Bounds Safety. The goal of the profile bounds safety is that you operate inside the bounds of allocated memory.

What does that mean: type safety by design. Type safety by design just means, that you always initialise your variables, use std::variant instead of a union, or prefer variadic templates and fold expressions to va_arg's.

The C++ core guidelines support three profiles: type safety, bounds safety, and lifetime safety. Thanks to the guideline support library (GSL), you can check your code against these profiles. Today, I start with the profile type safety.

Informally, profiles are a subset of rules of the C++ core guidelines for specific concerns such as type safety, bounds safety, and lifetime safety. Thanks to the guideline support library, they can be checked