How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

feature TrapC, a memory-safe version of the C programming language, is almost ready for testing.

"We're almost there," Robin Rowe told The Register in a phone interview. "It almost works."

We caught up with Rowe, a computer science professor and entrepreneur, amid debugging efforts that had kept him up until four in the morning. The long-awaited TrapC website has appeared.

"My work building TrapC has taken two parallel paths," Rowe explains in his initial post. "A TrapC interpreter called itrapc and a separate compiler called trapc. I had wanted to make a software release by 1 January 2026, but too many bugs. I only reached code complete this month and am now on the painstaking and sleepless process of debugging. When I have something stable that mostly works I will make a release. Sorry to make you wait a little longer. Aiming for Q1 2026."

Back in November 2024 ...