Memory Safe C++

In ordinary software, a crash, security breach, or data loss can be a big problem for your business. In the software running flight controls, railway signals, defibrillators, autonomous vehicles, and other safety-critical systems, it’s literally a matter of life and death. Memory Safe C++ shows you how to write verifiable, deterministic-by-design systems when failure is not an option. In it, you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of memory safety in C++ as you master practical principles of fail-safe operations, worst-case execution, and how to spot risky code--even when it compiles clean and passes every test.

In this timely book, author Jean Frantz René introduces the foundations of memory-safe C++ using industry-relevant examples. Every case study opens with code that compiles clean, survives a general-purpose lint, and gives you no reason to look twice. You'll learn to spot the patterns that hide corruption behind those green signals, and to read a codebase for the same shapes. In each example you’ll find the defect yourself, take it apart at the machine level, reimplement the fix, and reflect on what you have learned.

You’ll also consider the risks and tradeoffs with each solution. Each case study includes more than one working fix, compared on memory, determinism, compliance, and residual risk. You’ll learn what each solution costs and how to defend your choice for the problem. You'll also learn how a safety classification is assigned under IEC 62304, ISO 26262, DO-178C, EN 50716:2023, and IEC 61508, what it then demands of your code, and what a documented deviation has to carry.

Along the way, you’ll run the industry-standard Parasoft C/C++ test scans against MISRA C++: 2023 exactly as they were reported, with dynamic analysis output printed as it appears and a companion repository where you can run the code yourself. As you trace defects from source down to the machine, you'll see how the stack frame is built, how the function prologue changes between optimization levels, how the guard page reacts, and what the sanitizer's shadow state records. By the end, you'll be able to explain what the machine did, not just what the code appeared to say.