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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

Pretty easy to get llvm segfaults, I got that with pony also in development versions. The difference to rust is that this happens with rust compiled binaries also at run-time, in pony very rarely.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aissue+SIGSEG... => 87 + 291

vs https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/issues?q=is%3Aissue+SIGSEG... => 11 + 50

Now compare that to a safe systems language, e.g. sbcl: https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bugs?field.searchtext=SIGSE... => 1 (invalid)

or clisp: https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/bugs/?q=%7B%22status%22%3A+%... => 15

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Not to besmirch Pony (I think it's a very interesting language), but isn't some of this a base sampling error? There are probably a few orders of magnitude more engineers writing Rust (and therefore running `rustc`), so we'd expect crashes in Rust to surface more frequently.

Not in memory safe languages, sorry.

I'm not sure I understand. Rust is memory safe, and the memory unsafety happening here isn't in Rust itself: an IR generation bug in Rust is causing memory unsafety in LLVM, which is written in C++.

(Besides: If GitHub's stats are correct, `ponyc` seems to be >60% C and C++?)

Compilers for memory-safe languages can't have bugs in them?

Compilers for memory safe languages written in the same memory safe languages should be expected to have to same guarantees as any other program written in that language

I think that’s the fifth Futamura projection — compiling a compiler with itself cancels out bugs.

> The difference to rust is that this happens with rust compiled binaries also at run-time,

The list of issues you linked in an apparent attempt to support this claim are almost all (or maybe even all) compile time crashes not runtime crashes...

The post is also about crashes in rustc not crashes in rust programs, right?

The top level link, yes.

The comment I replied to... I quoted the text that made me think it wasn't. Am I misinterpreting it?

Pony committer here, I don't think this comparison is very fair, Rust has way more users, and thus way more eyes looking at it and reporting bugs. We've also had a few runtime segfauts before due to LLVM (mainly when porting to new platforms, like Apple's M1), and we try hard to fix them when we find them.

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