As a fellow relatively new to Haskell, I was surprised at all the unsafe constructs in the core. Almost everything you'd expect to find in C's standard library

As a fellow relatively new to Haskell, I was surprised at all the unsafe constructs in the core. Almost everything you'd expect to find in C's standard library is exposed somewhere, with roughly the same level of safety. (Which is to say, almost none.) The main difference I find between the two is that I have never needed to reach for an unsafe construct in Haskell myself - including some networking / parsing code that lives at roughly the same level of the stack as you'd find the heartbleed bug. The 'unsafe' functionality I use is encapsulated in libraries which expose a safer, higher-level interface. (Which is roughly the situation in Ruby with C bindings or Rust / Go with `unsafe` blocks.) I do feel there's a significant difference between a language where you need to be more-or-less constantly vigilant and one where you can isolate the memory management to a small, well-vetted library, but it's true that the situation still isn't ideal. (I think Haskell's story is much better as you move up the stack, but that's another story...) But if you're interested in a stronger level of safety in Haskell, you may be interested in Safe Haskell[0] -- it disables many of the unsafe features (or requires uses of them to be explicitly 'trusted') and thus provides much stronger safety guarantees. [0] http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.4.1/html/users_guide/safe-haskell.html http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.4.1/html/users_guide/safe-...