> Usually a project is oxidised into Rust because of many reasons, the main usually being memory safety.
What about python’s memory model is unsafe?
What about python’s memory model is unsafe?
Rather than memory safety per se, I'd actually value Rust's type safety over Python's. Yes, strictly speaking Python is dynamically typed rather than untyped, but Rust will shift a lot of your mistakes "hard left" (ie report your goof during compilation not during execution) compared to Python because it gets to do these checks up front, and it is also able to catch a lot more of them because it's much stricter about what types are.
In Python we can write "if foo" and it doesn't matter too much what type foo actually has, Python will try to decide if it's "truthy" at runtime. In Rust either foo is a boolean, in which case this is a reasonable thing to do, or it isn't, that's a type mismatch, your program doesn't compile. Not everyone loves this, but I certainly do.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int....
Edit: Just realized you said "even with garbage collection", so you weren't talking about Rust. Never mind.
https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr133/inde...
(section 17.4 of the full specification)
However in a sense Rust is cheating. Java has to do a lot of work because they can't stop you writing a data race in Java, so they want that to be safe anyway if it happens. (Safe) Rust just won't emit the data race in the first place.
A data race requires (as mentioned below in the thread about Python concurrency) that there's mutation concurrently with access to the same memory. In Java that's a bad idea, but it does happen, usually by mistake. In (Safe) Rust mutation requires that nobody else has a shared (immutable) reference to the object, so the data race can't occur because if we can mutate something by definition nobody else has a reference to it - programs with this mistake won't compile.
Making a language that banned them outright would be making a language that couldn't do things that people wanted to do.
But allow for memory unsafety? No, not if every ordering of the "critical sections" (chunks of code run as a unit while the interpreter is locked) is valid and upholds the invariants Python expects.
It is conceivable (but extremely unlikely, 'cos it was really, really hard) that after a GILectomy Python follows the Java path, in which data races are technically safe†. However it is most likely Python with a GILectomy will behave like Go or C# or numerous other languages and lose memory safety properties if a data race occurs.
† Data races can happen in Java, and astonishing things might happen, but objects always remain in some valid state, so there is no loss of memory safety whereas in most languages with data races you can e.g. race a hash table and mess up its internals and cause chaos.