Cyclone (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:25, 7 March 2023

Latest revision as of 08:06, 19 August 2025

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{{Short description|Memory-safe dialect of the C programming language}}

{{use dmy dates|date=August 2024}}

{{more footnotes|date=August 2015}}

{{Infobox programming language

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| website = {{URL|http://cyclone.thelanguage.org}}

| wikibooks =

| discontinued = Yes<ref>{{cite web |title=Open Access Cyclone (programming language) Journals · OA.mg |url=https://oa.mg/journals/open-access-cyclone-programming-language-journals |website=oa.mg |access-date=30 October 2022 |archive-date=30 October 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221030192542/https://oa.mg/journals/open-access-cyclone-programming-language-journals |url-status=live }}</ref>

}}

The '''Cyclone''' [[programming language]] iswas intended to be a safe dialect of the [[C (programming language)|C language]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Jim |first1=Trevor |last2=Morrisett |first2=J. Greg |last3=Grossman |first3=Dan |last4=Hicks |first4=Michael W. |last5=Cheney |first5=James |last6=Wang |first6=Yanling |date=2002-06-10 |title=Cyclone: isA designedSafe toDialect of C |url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/647057.713871 |journal=Proceedings of the General Track of the Annual Conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference |series=ATEC '02 |___location=USA |publisher=USENIX Association |pages=275–288 |isbn=978-1-880446-00-3}}</ref> It avoidavoids [[buffer overflow]]s and other vulnerabilities that are possible in C programs by design, without losing the power and convenience of C as a tool for [[system programming]]. It is no longer supported by its original developers, with the reference tooling not supporting [[64-bit computing|64-bit platforms]]. The [[Rust (programming language)|Rust]] language is mentioned by the original developers for having integrated many of the same ideas Cyclone had.<ref>{{cite web |title=Cyclone |url=http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/ |website=cyclone.thelanguage.org |access-date=11 December 2023 |archive-date=21 May 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060521202022/http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

Cyclone development was started as a joint project of Trevor Jim from [[AT&T Labs]] Research and [[Greg Morrisett]]'s group at [[Cornell University]] in 2001. Version 1.0 was released on May 8, 2006.<ref>{{cite web |title=Cyclone |url=httphttps://www.cs.cornell.edu/Projects/cyclone/ |website=[[Cornell University]] |access-date=30 October 2022 |archive-date=15 October 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221015034248/https://www.cs.cornell.edu/Projects/cyclone/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

==Language features==

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int strlen(const char *s)

{

int iteri = 0;

if (s == NULL)

return 0;

while (s[iteri] != '\0') {

iteri++;

}

return iteri;

}

</syntaxhighlight>

This function assumes that the string being passed in is terminated by {{code|NULL}} (<code>'\0'</code>). However, what would happen if {{code|style=white-space:nowrap|2=c|1=char buf[6] = {'h','e','l','l','o','!'};}} were passed to this string? This is perfectly legal in C, yet would cause <code>strlen</code> to iterate through memory not necessarily associated with the string <code>s</code>. There are functions, such as <code>strnlen</code> which can be used to avoid such problems, but these functions are not standard with every implementation of [[ANSI C]]. The Cyclone version of <code>strlen</code> is not so different from the C version:

<syntaxhighlight lang="C">

int strlen(const char ? s)

{

int iteri, n = s.size;

if (s == NULL)

return 0;

for (iteri = 0; iteri < n; iteri++, s++) {

if (*s == '\0')

return iteri;

}

return n;

}