Walter Bright

Contracts let a C++ function state what callers must guarantee and what it promises back. A violation can be ignored, observed, enforced or quick-enforced, chosen per build with no portable per-assertion switch, and the guide warns they are not input validation.

Walter Bright, who says he added contracts to Zortech C++ in the 1990s and to D later, wrote that they "just turned out to not be very useful". An embedded developer wants the opposite trade: checks on at the workstation, off on weak production CPUs.

strncpy was killed for 'counter-intuitive semantics' around NUL termination and wasteful zero-filling. The '360 patches' figure is 360 uses converted to safer calls, not 360 bugs.

The origin: it was written to copy 14-byte, zero-padded-but-not-terminated filenames out of early UNIX directory entries. It was never meant for strings.