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This comment irks me in a strange way. I've found very little software where what you care about doesn't build upon the fact that you trust your program's memor

This comment irks me in a strange way. I've found very little software where what you care about doesn't build upon the fact that you trust your program's memory safety. You can use C or any other language, but if your tools can't free you from that worry, memory safety should be something that your programs "absolutely" have.

Cloudef 6y ago
Not every program is connected to internet nor does they run elevated priviledges, or they run anything where people lives would be at stake. In addition operating systems gives you bunch of safety measures if you design around them. (Obvious being separate processes) One has to also remember that even if your program would be memory safe it still does not guarantee its flawless nor secure. One very good recent personal experience I can give you is certain popular swift SQL library. It was written in swift which also boasts the "memory safe by default". However, that library due to its design was subject to the very basic SQL injection attacks. Needless to say I ended up writing my own SQL bindings. I hope that library is now fixed or something replaced it, as since at the time I had to write swift (and no I didn't like it), it was the only and most popular (scary) option on github. I could also write long rant about threads and how the implementations and the threading primitives often have subtle bugs or are broken in different ways. And how using threads in general makes your application basically undefined unless you only absolutely know every piece of code that runs on that thread.
- alserio 6y ago
  I wasn't talking about security, but correctness, although statistically people underestimate the level of security required by their projects, more than not. Memory safety does not imply correctness, but if you want to reason about correctness you really have to trust that your program doesn't do something funky with your bits. And, at least my programs, like to prove me wrong about what I believe is possible.
  - Cloudef 6y ago
    If you want correctness, you need proofs, or generate the code from specification. And even then cosmic rays and bit-banging and faulty hardware can break your application. Or simple change of stack size :)

Cloudef 6y ago

Not every program is connected to internet nor does they run elevated priviledges, or they run anything where people lives would be at stake. In addition operating systems gives you bunch of safety measures if you design around them. (Obvious being separate processes) One has to also remember that even if your program would be memory safe it still does not guarantee its flawless nor secure. One very good recent personal experience I can give you is certain popular swift SQL library. It was written in swift which also boasts the "memory safe by default". However, that library due to its design was subject to the very basic SQL injection attacks. Needless to say I ended up writing my own SQL bindings. I hope that library is now fixed or something replaced it, as since at the time I had to write swift (and no I didn't like it), it was the only and most popular (scary) option on github. I could also write long rant about threads and how the implementations and the threading primitives often have subtle bugs or are broken in different ways. And how using threads in general makes your application basically undefined unless you only absolutely know every piece of code that runs on that thread.

alserio 6y ago
I wasn't talking about security, but correctness, although statistically people underestimate the level of security required by their projects, more than not. Memory safety does not imply correctness, but if you want to reason about correctness you really have to trust that your program doesn't do something funky with your bits. And, at least my programs, like to prove me wrong about what I believe is possible.
- Cloudef 6y ago
  If you want correctness, you need proofs, or generate the code from specification. And even then cosmic rays and bit-banging and faulty hardware can break your application. Or simple change of stack size :)