Generally higher level programmer here (Elixir), who has been dabbling with Zig lately (goal is to write an Elixir type checker!). It's quite refreshing, interesting, and dare I say it, fun!

I realize it doesn't have the same memory safety guarantees as rust, but what I don't quite understand, is what sort of danger that means I'm inviting these days. If my app doesn't deal with anything particular sensitive, do I need to worry about it too much? Am I inviting trouble for my users?

I read Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit back in the day, and I know that at one point, poorly behaving low level programs could escalate privileges, reach into other programs' memory and so forth.

But is that still relevant these days? I'd think OSes have gotten better about sandboxing programs and such. I know I've seen misbehaving programs segfault before, which I thought was the OS protecting against wayward memory access.

And "memory safety" really doesn't apply if targeting wasm, right? In that case Zig could really shine, since its great for cross compilation and really has memory allocations handled well, and doesn't need a GC, without the "memory safety" downsides.

I guess my question is how much rust's "memory safety" is kind of an XY problem? In what cases is that actually what I should be asking for, compared to the more general question of program correctness? I can see it in rust's original use case of a web browser, since, e.g., tabs shouldn't access each other, but does it apply to all "system" or low level programming use cases?