In the course of one of my contracts, I’ve been introduced to the Cyclone programming language – it’s basically purporting to be a safe version of C, with things like buffer overflows being a thing of the past. More here.

Wasn’t this one thing Java was meant to be, or am I missing something?

Update: I’ve found this article (PDF, sorry) which explains some of the differences. Not sure yet – OpenTV’s compiler was like this in the early days and it caused some interesting issues, although that compiled a ‘safe C’ to bytecode…