On Monday, 22 January 2024 at 16:39:10 UTC, Nick Treleaven wrote:
I've said multiple times that it's silly to spend so much time
on memory safety if the language is going to allow stuff like
this without a simple way to prevent it.
Memory safety issues are a worse class of bug than arithmetic
bugs.
The required language changes are pretty small to catch
arithmetic bugs relative to implementing memory safety.
Ultimately, you want the compiler to help you catch bugs in any
form, and I don't think someone that wants memory safety is
likely to be okay with the type of bugs in this thread.
But for me, arithmetic bugs are a much larger problem than memory
safety. I mostly use the GC plus calls into well-tested C
libraries. I get incorrect results, and when I'm lucky, my
program segfaults because I accessed something I shouldn't. When
I'm not, it silently and happily gives me the wrong answer.
