[gdal-dev] Memory safe GDAL experiment using Fil-C

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

I've discovered the Fil-C project, hosted at 
https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge, which offers a 
modified clang toolchain and instrumented libc that brings memory safety 
to the C/C++ ecosystem with little changes in source code and build 
scripts. I've given it a try and that seems promising. With a few small 
patches here and there to remove some iffy / unusual uses of C in PROJ 
and GDAL that Fil-C doesn't understand well yet, or adapt build scripts 
of libzstd (although it seems broken at runtime) and libtiff, I've 
managed to get a GDAL build functional enough to read & write GeoTIFF 
and GeoPackage, and presumably more. Obviously there's a price to pay, 
and I did notice the x2 to x4 runtime slowdown mentioned by the project. 
But that could still be of interest for the most security minded people 
who haven't yet had the time to rewrite the whole stack in Rust :-)

How to build such hardened GDAL? Rough procedure (which is probably 
slightly broken since I didn't repeat it from scratch):

git clone https://github.com/rouault/llvm-project-deluge --branch gdal
cd llvm-project-deluge
docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/work ubuntu:24.04
cd /work
./build_gdal_all.sh  # and wait for a few hours

You should get your binaries in /work/pizfix/bin

Even

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