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I've never understood the obsession with memory-safe languages. I get that they are easier to program in and they eliminate certain classes of bugs, but most en

I've never understood the obsession with memory-safe languages. I get that they are easier to program in and they eliminate certain classes of bugs, but most end users don't care. They just want a product that works. The security argument also makes less sense for browsers because most web app exploits are unrelated to memory safety.

EugeneOZ 5y ago
“they are easier to program”? quite contrary.
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  I wrote "they are easier to program in", which I think most people would agree with. Go is obviously a much easier language than C++. It is hard to find a memory-safe language that is harder to program in unless it is something like Haskell, which is hard because it is foreign to most programmers not because of memory safety per se. Edit: Maybe Rust is harder to program in than C++, I'm not sure (don't know Rust really). But probably most people who find Rust hard would be writing buggy C++ programs and Rust is preventing them from making bugs that they would otherwise not be aware of.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    No, Rust isn’t harder. I just had a wrong understanding of the “memory-safe language” term. Sorry, I thought it’s about guarantees that Rust gives, but looks like the bar (from the official term) is much lower. Sorry for misunderstanding.
    - jeffreyrogers 5y ago
      No problem!
mdaniel 5y ago
> The security argument also makes less sense for browsers because most web app exploits are unrelated to memory safety. Is demonstrably untrue: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1224&product_id=15031&cvssscoremin=9 https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  Those are Chrome's exploits, not web apps.