Cyclone (original) (raw)

Cyclone is a safe dialect of C.

Cyclone is like C: it has pointers and pointer arithmetic, structs, arrays, goto, manual memory management, and C’s preprocessor and syntax.

Cyclone adds features such as pattern matching, algebraic datatypes, exceptions, region-based memory management, and optional garbage collection.

Cyclone is safe: pure Cyclone programs are not vulnerable to a wide class of bugs that plague C programs: buffer overflows, format string attacks, double free bugs, dangling pointer accesses, etc.

Cyclone is no longer supported; the core research project has finished and the developers have moved on to other things. (Several of Cyclone's ideas have made their way into Rust.) Cyclone's code can be made to work with some effort, but it will not build out of the box on modern (64 bit) platforms).

Cyclone is available as a VirtualBox VM for 32-bit platforms. See this blog post for how to get and install it. (Get the VM from here if it fails to download via the blog post's instructions.)

Getting started

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