This is not generally considered part of the "memory safety" contract. You can not lift a nil pointer exception into a replacement for Go's "unsafe" library.

When we finally rid ourselves of C and C++ is so larded over with extensions and additions and features that we can finally plausibly say the C subset is just not in use anymore, we can perhaps consider as a community expanding what "memory safe" means, but in the meantime it has some very important meanings and we should not try to augment the term. Memory safety doesn't mean anything like "forcing exhaustiveness into sum type deconstructions" or "never has a race condition" (though it does mean said race condition shouldn't be something that allows you to escape out of an array or forcibly change the type on something in a way the language doesn't normally permit) or any of several other things that may be very nice to have indeed, but are not part of the definition of "memory safe".

Memory safe is a very old concept, and almost everything is memory safe now. But not quite, and as such the term still has use. And also zig for some reason gave it up so it won't be disappearing as soon as I'd like.'

you can dereference nil in Go and it panics