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35% of vulnerabilities in the biggest tech companies being due to use after free bugs are a part of the answer. (More than 90% of severe vulnerabilities are due

by yosefk 2y ago

35% of vulnerabilities in the biggest tech companies being due to use after free bugs are a part of the answer. (More than 90% of severe vulnerabilities are due to memory bugs impossible in memory-safe languages.)

samatman 2y ago
Every memory-safe language has a runtime written in a memory-managed language. Yes, even Rust: Rust is implemented using many (well-vetted) unsafe blocks. So projects to improve the quality, and lower the defect rate, in memory-managed programming, are far from wasted. Even if they only get used to write fast garbage collectors so that line coders can get on with the work of delivering value to customers.
loeg 2y ago
Manual memory management vs GC is orthogonal to memory safe vs unsafe.
- AgentME 2y ago
  In practice the lines of each issue are placed very close together. Other than Rust, there are no popular memory safe languages that use manual memory management.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Rust doesn’t use manual memory management?
    - maleldil 2y ago
      It does because you're still responsible for managing the lifetimes, even if you don't explicitly call malloc/free. Automatic memory management is reference counting and GC.