> I read the paper's description, and still don't quite understand exactly what they mean by "memory safety". This is not referring to safer programming practic

> I read the paper's description, and still don't quite understand exactly what they mean by "memory safety". This is not referring to safer programming practices like using the STL with iterators, correct? Memory safety generally refers to treating each region of memory as it's expected type, not over-writing or over-reading the bounds of allocated region, not reading unitialized or freed memory, and so on. It's a correctness problem that often ends up in the news since it's usually unchecked in C and C++ meaning that errors of that type don't necessarily result in predictable exceptions or process termination, but rather all sorts of exciting exploits. Many higher-level languages have no similar memory safety issue (absent bugs in their implementations) since they exclude features that could result in the above problems, and include explicit runtime checks in places where the compiler or runtime cannot prove that an access is safe.