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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm starting a language war, but...

I see how Rust is on that list.

I don't get how the other languages are on that list. I mean, yes, I guess they're marginally better than C and C++ at memory-safety, but... just barely...?

Like... this report?

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...

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I’m a big fan of Rust, and I think it’s reasonable for those languages to be listed: with the exception of a few niches, most of the code written in those languages will be spatially and temporally memory safe. They’re also popular languages with large ecosystems, so listing them “grounds” the guidance.

What do you mean just barely? They're exactly as safe as Rust. Perhaps they're not making it a selling point because it's been obvious for a few decades that automatic memory management tends to be memory safe.

In fact some languages are even safer (e.g. Scheme and various Lisp implementations don't have integer overflows due to having bignums by default).

I guess I'm using "memory safety" very broadly and not literally, which I admit is not good.

But, the borrow-checker seems to be significantly safer than anything else I've read about. Having no null pointer sounds very smart...

Fair enough. I think Rust is the only language on that list which solves the "billion dollar mistake" (null pointers).

Null pointers are not a memory safety issue in most managed languages. It is completely well-defined behavior in Java for example, you can safely catch any NPE and go on as if nothing happened. This is not true of C, where dereferencing a nullptr is incredibly unsafe.

Except Rust can still have serious memory safety errors like double-frees and memory leaks.

All those other languages cannot. Rust is much less safe than a GC language in terms of memory.

C# cannot have a memory leak?

We're using very different definitions of those words, I guess.

https://slashdot.org/story/07/11/17/0552247/c-memory-leak-to...

C# allows you to tune the GC, which I believe was the cause of that issue.

Keep in mind by turning off the GC, how have now made C# just as safe as rust, not unsafer.

I think that one was actually circular references in event handlers...

I don’t think so, but I can’t find the answer. Either way, rust 100% does that.

Way easier in C# to avoid that issue. Just don’t use reference counters and use GC.

No way to avoid that in Rust. If you need many references, you must use ARC.

Safe and fast: Pick 1 has been the standard for a while. Rust is both, but this doesn't mean the others aren't safe.

I think the key thing is ironclad protection against memory corruption or gain unintended code execution access (barring a bug in the implementation of the compiler/runtime which can of course affect any language).

I've actually heard claims of memory safety in Ruby for the last few years and I was always skeptical...but this gives those claims a lot more merit for sure.

And worst case, there's always jRuby.

How is Java not memory-safe?

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