2 ms·

> This is arguable That's not arguable. Because if we say that memory safety is important because it prevents some common and dangerous vulnerabilities, then Z

by pron 1y ago

> This is arguable That's not arguable. Because if we say that memory safety is important because it prevents some common and dangerous vulnerabilities, then Zig clearly prevents the most dangerous of those, while C doesn't. > you can't prevent a program from inadvertently... Now you're naming more problems that aren't as high on the list as the ones Zig does prevent (and C doesn't). It's true that type confusion is also rather high on the list, but Zig clearly reduces type confusion much more than C does. Nobody denies that Rust prevents more issues than Zig via sound guarantees - albeit at what I think is a significant cost, and we can argue, subjectively, over whether those issues are worth that cost or not - but Zig's guarantees are still closer to Rust's than to C's if eliminating very common/dangerous vulnerabilities is what we're judging by.

zozbot234 1y ago
The underlying issue is that Zig turns out to have no feasible safe subset, just like C - unless you go as far as to declare things like using tagged unions in combination with pointers "unsafe" which is both insanely restrictive and hard to check programmatically. People might complain about having to fight the borrow checker, but they'd complain a whole lot more if the standard approach to safety-subsetting a language was just bounds-checked array access plus "you can write FORTRAN in any language!"
- pron 1y ago
  > The underlying issue is that Zig turns out to have no feasible safe subset It does have a safe subset with respect to spatial memory safety, which is the more important kind of memory safety if what we judge by is dangerous vulnerabilities. > People might complain about having to fight the borrow checker, but they would complain a lot more if the standard approach to safety-subsetting a language was just bounds-checked array access plus "you can write FORTRAN in any language!" I don't know how you can say that this is an objectively-supported claim given Rust's poor adoption at its age.

by pron 1y ago

zozbot234 1y ago

The underlying issue is that Zig turns out to have no feasible safe subset, just like C - unless you go as far as to declare things like using tagged unions in combination with pointers "unsafe" which is both insanely restrictive and hard to check programmatically. People might complain about having to fight the borrow checker, but they'd complain a whole lot more if the standard approach to safety-subsetting a language was just bounds-checked array access plus "you can write FORTRAN in any language!"

pron 1y ago
> The underlying issue is that Zig turns out to have no feasible safe subset It does have a safe subset with respect to spatial memory safety, which is the more important kind of memory safety if what we judge by is dangerous vulnerabilities. > People might complain about having to fight the borrow checker, but they would complain a lot more if the standard approach to safety-subsetting a language was just bounds-checked array access plus "you can write FORTRAN in any language!" I don't know how you can say that this is an objectively-supported claim given Rust's poor adoption at its age.