[C++] Visual Studio 2005 Safe C and C++ Libraries

May-05 issue of MSDN Journal discusses new Safe C and C++ Libraries. Some of the changes are really revolutionary:

Changes include deprecation of functions that are known to be risky, such as
strcpy. New, safer functions have been added to supersede them. Many functions
have gained extra error checking and validation.

Hopefully, standard organizations will react on this, otherwise we risk to have completely incompatible implementations of C++ for different platforms. However, this is quite optimisitic:

We considered it our responsibility to the development community to extend
beyond our own product, so I was delighted to get a chance to work with the C
standards committee on the proposals for the Safe Libraries. The committee has
provided lots of useful suggestions and feedback to help us evolve the
functions. We're hoping that we'll soon be able to issue the technical report on
this subject from the C committee.

Personally, I appreciate any initiative that makes code more secure and reliable, even at the expence of performance.