Highlighting a different systemic problem is not at all an argument against avoiding this problem. Indeed, if memory safety were the only problem to worry about

Highlighting a different systemic problem is not at all an argument against avoiding this problem. Indeed, if memory safety were the only problem to worry about, then I'd be less worried about it, because we could spend more time on it. But it isn't, there are all sorts of other things to worry about, simultaneously. > This would be like judging SQL statements as fundamentally unsafe because websites written in PHP tended to (specially in the early 2000) be written in a very unsafe manner where user input was put directly into SQL strings. This is indeed a good example, but supports my argument rather than yours. If we had devised ways to make it impossible (or incredibly hard and weird) to introduce sql injection vulnerabilities at the language level, then that would be excellent. One less thing to worry about! I don't have a unique grudge against memory safety issues. It's just one type of issue that we've spent a lot of time devising solutions to that don't just boil down to "be very careful" and I'm generally supportive of any solution to any problem like that, if the tradeoffs are acceptable. But I agree with you that it's a great thing to have language and library support that make memory safety issues significantly less common and problematic (to be clear, I only just heard of Odin from this article, but I think it looks pretty awesome on initial glance), and that that gets to the level of solution that we have for sql injection in practice. I think there are somewhat better alternative solutions available in the case of memory safety, but they have different tradeoffs. > What remains is a matter of what attracts you to programming: are you interested in having explicit control over a system to make it do what you want, or are you more interested in expressing some abstract ideas in an abstract mathematical virtual machine? I'm mostly interested in the first thing, but I think these are both false choices. There is a language that provides that explicit control with more memory safety (rust) with a different trade off (language complexity), and most other languages are memory safe without being focused on expressing abstract ideas in an abstract mathematical virtual machine (go, java, python, etc. etc.).