At CppCon 2018, I gave an update of my Lifetime analysis work that makes common cases of pointer/iterator/range/etc. dangling detectable at compile time (the spec is here in the C++ Core Guidelines GitHub repo). During that talk, we mentioned and demo’d two implementations: as a Visual C++ extension by Kyle Reed and Neil MacIntosh, and in a fork of Clang by Matthias Gehre and Gábor Horváth who both also joined me on-stage.

Last month at EuroLLVM, Matthias and Gábor gave a 30-minute progress report talk about their work to upstream the Lifetime rules implementation into Clang, “Implementing the C++ Core Guidelines’ Lifetime Safety Profile in Clang.” They give a summary of the approach and how it maps to Clang internals, show initial results from testing against Clang’s and LLVM’s own sources, and end with a nice roadmap for the next steps of incrementally upstreaming the work to Clang trunk.

If you care about making C++ safer, I recommend taking a look… it’s a great summary and update. Thanks, Matthias and Gábor and Kyle and Neil for their collaboration on this project!