http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~greg/cs256sp2005/lec15.txt
I have quickly looked over that paper and find it quite worthless for a couple of reasons (I will not elaborate on, except one: All these scientific elaborations are nice and all but we have real problems here in the real world. Frankly, someone having worked on "Cyclone" may be bright and all, but he definitely hasn't got som major points).
While Eiffel and D look (and in quite some respects are) quite different, both have actually realized some important real world problems and have them addressed in not so different conceptual ways.
One of the reasons D is considerably more safe than C is strikingly simple and one doesn't need any scientific research to spot it: D offers (a quite sane implementation of) strings and "resizeable arrays".
Why is this related to safety? Because zillions of bugs have been created by programmers desperately using, bending and abusing what was available in C (and to a degree in C++). Give them reasonable strings and some reasonable way to handle dynamic arrays and you have prevented gazillions of bugs. Simple as that.
Another pragmatic look at reality underlines my point: In todays world even major software projects are being worked on by people with an almost brutally large degree of variation in their skills. Even worse, each of them (at least sometimes) has to work with code written by others with a (sometimes very) sifferent level of skills.
D has made a very major contribution to safety alone for the fact that it allows less skilled people to create less errors. And it has something else that might not seem that big a thing, that however, started a (imo) very important path: safe, trusted and system. In C/C++ pretty everybody can - and does - play with potentially dangerous mechanism (like pointers) pretty much everywhere. Those simple 3 "code classes" safe, trusted and system can help a great deal there. One (OK, not very creative) example that comes to mind is to have less experienced programmers to work in "safe mode" only, which anyway is good enough for pretty everything the average app needs, and to limit "system mode" to seasoned programmers. Furthermore this D mechanism offers something else of high value by introducing a simple and important question "How much power do I need?".
I might sound streetwise rather than properly educated, I know, but I have experienced again and again that what really counts is results. And I'm sure that D, if understood and used properly, contributes quite much to a very important result: Less bugs and more reliable code.
