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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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